Aarhus Universitets segl

The Cavalieri estimator with unequal section spacing revisited

by Markus Kiderlen and Karl-Anton Dorph-Petersen
CSGB Research Reports Number 4 (March 2017)

The Cavalieri method allows to estimate the volume of a compact object from area measurements in equidistant parallel planar sections. However, the spacing and thickness of sections can be quite irregular in applications. Recent publications have thus focused on the effect of random variability in section spacing, showing that the classical Cavalieri estimator is still unbiased when the stack of parallel planes is stationary, but that the existing variance approximations must be adjusted. The present paper considers the special situations, where the distances between consecutive section planes can be measured and thus where Cavalieri's estimator can be replaced by a quadrature rule with randomized sampling points. We show that, under mild conditions, the trapezoid rule and Simpson's rule lead to unbiased volume estimators and give simulation results that indicate that a considerable variance reduction compared to the generalized Cavalieri estimator can be achieved.

Keywords: Cavalieri estimator, variance approximations, perturbed spacing, randomized Newton-Cotes quadrature

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