Here is my problem statement, and the bolded item in the bulleted list is where I'm having trouble with. I think my question comes from my poor understanding of Monte Carlo sampling and conditional probability.
Problem Statement: I need to perform Monte Carlo simulation for a problem where, in its simplest form, can be represented as:
$Z= f(Y1(\mu,\sigma), Y2(\mu,\sigma))$, where
$\mu_{Y1} = f(X1(\mu,\sigma), X2(\mu,\sigma))$
I know the distributions of $X1$, $X2$, and $Y2$, and also $\sigma_{Y2}$, and I want to apply Monte Carlo to get realizations of $Z$.
Flow of analysis:
- Generate $N$ samples on $X1$, $X2$, and $Y2$
- Calculate an instance of $\mu_{Y1}$ for every pair of $X1$ and $X2$ samples
- What to do here? For every $\mu_{Y1}$ instance, do I
- generate 1 sample of $Y1$ and propagate this sample with the sample of $Y2$ to get $Z$, or
- generate $N$ samples of $Y1$, which increases the dimension of $Z$ to $N^2$?
- Obtain my realizations of $Z$
Am I even on the right track? Any help and thoughts are much appreciated.