We introduce the Pade--Z$_2$ (PZ) stochastic estimator for calculating determinants and determinant ratios. The estimator is applied to the calculation of fermion determinants from the two ends of the Hybrid Monte Carlo trajectories with pseudofermions. Our results on the $8^3 times 12$ lattice with Wilson action show that the statistical errors from the stochastic estimator can be reduced by more than an order of magnitude by employing an unbiased variational subtraction scheme which utilizes the off-diagonal matrices from the hopping expansion. Having been able to reduce the error of the determinant ratios to about 20 % with a relatively small number of noise vectors, this may become a feasible algorithm for simulating dynamical fermions in full QCD. We also discuss the application to the density of states in Hamiltonian systems.
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