Refine
Year of publication
- 2017 (2)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- ZIB-Report (1)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
Institute
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.