poissonmh
Markov chain Monte Carlo without evaluating the target: an auxiliary variable approach
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalising constant. However, in many situations, evaluating even the unnormalised distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such as sampling from the Bayesian posterior for tall datasets and the 'doubly-intractable' distributions. In this paper, we begin by observing that seemingly different Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, such as the exchange algorithm, PoissonMH, and TunaMH, can be unified under a simple common procedure. We then extend this procedure into a novel framework that allows the use of auxiliary variables in both the proposal and acceptance-rejection steps. We develop the theory of the new framework, applying it to existing algorithms to simplify and extend their results. Several new algorithms emerge from this framework, with improved performance demonstrated on both synthetic and real datasets.
- North America > United States > Florida > Hillsborough County > University (0.04)
- North America > United States > California > Orange County > Irvine (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Uncertainty > Bayesian Inference (0.67)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Undirected Networks > Markov Models (0.61)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Directed Networks > Bayesian Learning (0.45)