In Search of Rogue Waves: A Novel Proposal Distribution for Parallelized Rejection Sampling of the Truncated KdV Gibbs Measure

The Gibbs ensemble of the truncated KdV (TKdV) equation has been shown to accurately describe the anomalous wave statistics observed in laboratory experiments, in particular the emergence of extreme events. Here, we introduce a novel proposal distribution that facilitates efficient rejection sampling of the TKdV Gibbs measure. Within parameter regimes accessible to laboratory experiments and capable of producing extreme events, the proposal distribution generates 1–6 orders of magnitude more accepted samples than does a naive, uniform distribution. When equipped with the new proposal distribution, a simple rejection algorithm enjoys key advantages over a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, include better parallelization properties and generation of uncorrelated samples.