Seminars 2008 — Abstracts

Friday, April 11

Speaker: Robert Kohn, University of NSW

Title: Adaptive Independent Metropolis-Hastings by Fast Estimation of Mixtures of Normals

Abstract: Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings samplers use information obtained from previous draws to tune the proposal distribution automatically and repeatedly. Adaptation needs to be done carefully to ensure convergence to the correct target distribution because the resulting chain is not Markovian. We construct a sampler that uses a mixture of normals as a proposal distribution. To take full advantage of the potential of adaptive sampling our algorithm updates the mixture of normals frequently, starting early in the chain. The algorithm is built for speed and reliability and its sampling performance is evaluated with real and simulated examples. Our article outlines conditions for adaptive sampling to hold and gives a readily accessible proof that under these conditions the sampling scheme generates iterates that converge to the target distribution.