We present a report on recent progress in application of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to accurate electronic structure calculations of ferroelectric transition metal oxides. There are three major aspects: i) construction of accurate many‐body trial functions using orbitals from one‐particle approaches such as Hartree‐Fock and density functional theory, in particular, the hybrid functionals such as B3LYP; ii) efficient calculations of excitation energies both in variational and diffusion QMC; iii) method for calculating the small energy differences such as subtle features on total energy surfaces related to ferroelectric distortions. © 2003 American Institute of Physics