66,935 research outputs found
Adaptive Importance Sampling in General Mixture Classes
In this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm that iteratively updates both
the weights and component parameters of a mixture importance sampling density
so as to optimise the importance sampling performances, as measured by an
entropy criterion. The method is shown to be applicable to a wide class of
importance sampling densities, which includes in particular mixtures of
multivariate Student t distributions. The performances of the proposed scheme
are studied on both artificial and real examples, highlighting in particular
the benefit of a novel Rao-Blackwellisation device which can be easily
incorporated in the updating scheme.Comment: Removed misleading comment in Section
Ecological non-linear state space model selection via adaptive particle Markov chain Monte Carlo (AdPMCMC)
We develop a novel advanced Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that
is capable of sampling from the posterior distribution of non-linear state
space models for both the unobserved latent states and the unknown model
parameters. We apply this novel methodology to five population growth models,
including models with strong and weak Allee effects, and test if it can
efficiently sample from the complex likelihood surface that is often associated
with these models. Utilising real and also synthetically generated data sets we
examine the extent to which observation noise and process error may frustrate
efforts to choose between these models. Our novel algorithm involves an
Adaptive Metropolis proposal combined with an SIR Particle MCMC algorithm
(AdPMCMC). We show that the AdPMCMC algorithm samples complex, high-dimensional
spaces efficiently, and is therefore superior to standard Gibbs or Metropolis
Hastings algorithms that are known to converge very slowly when applied to the
non-linear state space ecological models considered in this paper.
Additionally, we show how the AdPMCMC algorithm can be used to recursively
estimate the Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao Lower Bound of Tichavsk\'y (1998). We derive
expressions for these Cram\'er-Rao Bounds and estimate them for the models
considered. Our results demonstrate a number of important features of common
population growth models, most notably their multi-modal posterior surfaces and
dependence between the static and dynamic parameters. We conclude by sampling
from the posterior distribution of each of the models, and use Bayes factors to
highlight how observation noise significantly diminishes our ability to select
among some of the models, particularly those that are designed to reproduce an
Allee effect
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