Augmentation schemes for particle MCMC

Fearnhead, Paul and Meligkotsidou, Loukia (2016) Augmentation schemes for particle MCMC. Statistics and Computing, 26 (6). pp. 1293-1306. ISSN 0960-3174

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Abstract

Particle MCMC involves using a particle filter within an MCMC algorithm. For inference of a model which involves an unobserved stochastic process, the standard implementation uses the particle filter to propose new values for the stochastic process, and MCMC moves to propose new values for the parameters. We show how particle MCMC can be generalised beyond this. Our key idea is to introduce new latent variables. We then use the MCMC moves to update the latent variables, and the particle filter to propose new values for the parameters and stochastic process given the latent variables. A generic way of defining these latent variables is to model them as pseudo-observations of the parameters or of the stochastic process. By choosing the amount of information these latent variables have about the parameters and the stochastic process we can often improve the mixing of the particle MCMC algorithm by trading off the Monte Carlo error of the particle filter and the mixing of the MCMC moves. We show that using pseudo-observations within particle MCMC can improve its efficiency in certain scenarios: dealing with initialisation problems of the particle filter; speeding up the mixing of particle Gibbs when there is strong dependence between the parameters and the stochastic process; and enabling further MCMC steps to be used within the particle filter.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Statistics and Computing
Additional Information:
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11222-015-9603-4 Preprint version available as arXiv:1408.698
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1700/1703
Subjects:
?? dirichlet process mixture modelsparticle gibbssequential monte carlostate-space modelsstochastic volatilitycomputational theory and mathematicstheoretical computer sciencestatistics and probabilitystatistics, probability and uncertainty ??
ID Code:
70663
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
08 Sep 2014 08:12
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
31 Dec 2023 00:31