On randomized estimators of the Hafnian of a nonnegative matrix

We investigate the performance of two approximation algorithms for the Hafnian of a nonnegative square matrix, namely the Barvinok and Godsil-Gutman estimators. We observe that, while there are examples of matrices for which these algorithms fail to provide a good approximation, the algorithms perform surprisingly well for adjacency matrices of random graphs. In most cases, the Godsil-Gutman estimator provides a far superior accuracy. For dense graphs, however, both estimators demonstrate a slow growth of the variance. For complete graphs, we show analytically that the relative variance $\sigma / \mu$ grows as a square root of the size of the graph. Finally, we simulate a Gaussian Boson Sampling experiment using the Godsil-Gutman estimator and show that the technique used can successfully reproduce low-order correlation functions.