Control variate technique: A constructive approach

The technique of control variates requires that the user identify a set of variates that are correlated with the estimation variable and whose means are known to the user. We relax the known mean requirement and instead assume the means are to be estimated. We argue that this strategy can be beneficial in parametric studies, analyze the properties of controlled estimators, and propose a class of generic and effective controls in a parametric estimation setting. We discuss the effectiveness of the estimators via analysis and simulation experiments.