Working Paper (2021)
Fernández-de-Marcos Alberto and García-Portugués Eduardo
By Drovandi Christopher, Boys Richard, and Moores Matthew
Working Paper (2017)
The grouped independence Metropolis-Hastings (GIMH) and Markov chain within Metropolis (MCWM) algorithms are pseudo-marginal methods used to perform Bayesian inference in latent variable models. These methods replace intractable likelihood calculations with unbiased estimates within Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The GIMH method has the posterior of interest as its limiting distribution, but suffers from poor mixing if it is too computationally intensive to obtain high-precision likelihood estimates. The MCWM algorithm has better mixing properties, but tends to give conservative approximations of the posterior and is still expensive. In this paper we accelerate the GIMH method by using a Gaussian process (GP) approximation to the log-likelihood and train this GP using a short pilot run of the MCWM algorithm. Our new method, GP-GIMH, is illustrated on simulated data from a stochastic volatility and a gene network model. Our approach produces reasonable estimates of the univariate and bivariate posterior distributions, and the posterior correlation matrix in these examples with at least an order of magnitude improvement in computing time.
Drovandi C., Boys R., and Moores M. (2017) Accelerating Pseudo-Marginal MCMC using Gaussian Processes. Working Paper.