Approximating the α - permanent

The standard matrix permanent is the solution to a number of combinatorial and graph-theoretic problems, and theα-weighted permanent is the density function for a class of Cox processes called boson processes. The exact computation of the ordinary permanent is known to be #P-complete, and the same appears to be the case for the α-permanent for most values of α. At present, the lack of a satisfactory algorithm for approximating the α-permanent is a formidable obstacle to the use of boson processes in applied work. This paper proposes an importance-sampling estimator using nonuniform random permutations generated in a cycle format. Empirical investigation reveals that the estimator works well for the sorts of matrices that arise in point-process applications, involving up to a few hundred points. We conclude with a numerical illustration of the Bayes estimate of the intensity function of a boson point process, which is a ratio of α-permanents.