Particle filtering within adaptive Metropolis-Hastings sampling Ralph S. Silva Paolo Giordani School of Economics Research Department University of New South Wales Sveriges Riksbank
[email protected] [email protected] Robert Kohn∗ Michael K. Pitt School of Economics Economics Department University of New South Wales University of Warwick
[email protected] [email protected] October 29, 2018 Abstract We show that it is feasible to carry out exact Bayesian inference for non-Gaussian state space models using an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings sampling scheme with the likelihood approximated by the particle filter. Furthermore, an adaptive independent Metropolis Hastings sampler based on a mixture of normals proposal is computation- ally much more efficient than an adaptive random walk Metropolis proposal because the cost of constructing a good adaptive proposal is negligible compared to the cost of approximating the likelihood. Independent Metropolis-Hastings proposals are also arXiv:0911.0230v1 [stat.CO] 2 Nov 2009 attractive because they are easy to run in parallel on multiple processors. We also show that when the particle filter is used, the marginal likelihood of any model is obtained in an efficient and unbiased manner, making model comparison straightforward. Keywords: Auxiliary variables; Bayesian inference; Bridge sampling; Marginal likeli- hood. ∗Corresponding author. 1 Introduction We show that it is feasible to carry out exact Bayesian inference on the parameters of a general state space model by using the particle filter to approximate the likelihood and adaptive Metropolis-Hastings sampling to generate unknown parameters. The state space model can be quite general, but we assume that the observation equation can be evaluated analytically and that it is possible to generate from the state transition equation.