Approximating the Permanent by Sampling from Adaptive Partitions

Computing the permanent of a non-negative matrix is a core problem with practical applications ranging from target tracking to statistical thermodynamics. However, this problem is also #P-complete, which leaves little hope for finding an exact solution that can be computed efficiently. While the problem admits a fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme, this method has seen little use because it is both inefficient in practice and difficult to implement.