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We describe and analyze a variance reduction approach for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling that accelerates the estimation of statistics of computationally expensive simulation models using an ensemble of models with lower cost. These lower cost models -which are typically lower fidelity with unknown statistics -are used to reduce the variance in statistical estimators relative to a MC estimator with equivalent cost. We derive the conditions under which our proposed approximate control variate framework recovers existing multi-model variance reduction schemes as special cases. We demonstrate that these existing strategies use recursive sampling strategies, and as a result, their maximum possible variance reduction is limited to that of a control variate algorithm that uses only a single low-fidelity model with known mean. This theoretical result holds regardless of the number of low-fidelity models and/or samples used to build the estimator. We then derive new sampling strategies within our framework that circumvent this limitation to make efficient use of all available information sources. In particular, we demonstrate that a significant gap can exist, of orders of magnitude in some cases, between the variance reduction achievable by using a single low-fidelity model and our non-recursive approach. We also present initial sample allocation approaches for exploiting this gap. They yield the greatest benefit when augmenting the high-fidelity model evaluations is impractical because, for instance, they arise from a legacy database. Several analytic examples and an example with a hyperbolic PDE describing elastic wave propagation in heterogeneous media are used to illustrate the main features of the methodology.

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