Sanket Agrawal, Dootika Vats, K. Łatuszyński, G. Roberts
{"title":"Optimal scaling of MCMC beyond Metropolis","authors":"Sanket Agrawal, Dootika Vats, K. Łatuszyński, G. Roberts","doi":"10.1017/apr.2022.37","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis–Hastings (MH) algorithms. Recently, acceptance probabilities other than MH are being employed in problems with intractable target distributions. There are few resources available on tuning the Gaussian proposal distributions for this situation. We obtain optimal scaling results for a general class of acceptance functions, which includes Barker’s and lazy MH. In particular, optimal values for Barker’s algorithm are derived and found to be significantly different from that obtained for the MH algorithm. Our theoretical conclusions are supported by numerical simulations indicating that when the optimal proposal variance is unknown, tuning to the optimal acceptance probability remains an effective strategy.","PeriodicalId":53160,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Applied Probability","volume":"55 1","pages":"492 - 509"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Advances in Applied Probability","FirstCategoryId":"100","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apr.2022.37","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"STATISTICS & PROBABILITY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
Abstract
Abstract The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis–Hastings (MH) algorithms. Recently, acceptance probabilities other than MH are being employed in problems with intractable target distributions. There are few resources available on tuning the Gaussian proposal distributions for this situation. We obtain optimal scaling results for a general class of acceptance functions, which includes Barker’s and lazy MH. In particular, optimal values for Barker’s algorithm are derived and found to be significantly different from that obtained for the MH algorithm. Our theoretical conclusions are supported by numerical simulations indicating that when the optimal proposal variance is unknown, tuning to the optimal acceptance probability remains an effective strategy.
期刊介绍：
The Advances in Applied Probability has been published by the Applied Probability Trust for over four decades, and is a companion publication to the Journal of Applied Probability. It contains mathematical and scientific papers of interest to applied probabilists, with emphasis on applications in a broad spectrum of disciplines, including the biosciences, operations research, telecommunications, computer science, engineering, epidemiology, financial mathematics, the physical and social sciences, and any field where stochastic modeling is used.
A submission to Applied Probability represents a submission that may, at the Editor-in-Chief’s discretion, appear in either the Journal of Applied Probability or the Advances in Applied Probability. Typically, shorter papers appear in the Journal, with longer contributions appearing in the Advances.
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