@misc{HartmannRichterSchuetteetal., author = {Hartmann, Carsten and Richter, Lorenz and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof and Zhang, Wei}, title = {Variational characterization of free energy: Theory and algorithms}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-65045}, abstract = {The article surveys and extends variational formulations of the thermodynamic free energy and discusses their information-theoretic content from the perspective of mathematical statistics. We revisit the well-known Jarzynski equality for nonequilibrium free energy sampling within the framework of importance sampling and Girsanov change-of-measure transformations. The implications of the different variational formulations for designing efficient stochastic optimization and nonequilibrium simulation algorithms for computing free energies are discussed and illustrated.}, language = {en} }