Gibbs Sampling, Exponential Families and Orthogonal Polynomials
Statistical Science 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2, 151–178 DOI: 10.1214/07-STS252 c Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2008 Gibbs Sampling, Exponential Families and Orthogonal Polynomials1 Persi Diaconis, Kshitij Khare and Laurent Saloff-Coste Abstract. We give families of examples where sharp rates of conver- gence to stationarity of the widely used Gibbs sampler are available. The examples involve standard exponential families and their conjugate priors. In each case, the transition operator is explicitly diagonalizable with classical orthogonal polynomials as eigenfunctions. Key words and phrases: Gibbs sampler, running time analyses, expo- nential families, conjugate priors, location families, orthogonal polyno- mials, singular value decomposition. 1. INTRODUCTION which has f as stationary density under mild con- ditions discussed in [4, 102]. The Gibbs sampler, also known as Glauber dy- The algorithm was introduced in 1963 by Glauber namics or the heat-bath algorithm, is a mainstay of [49] to do simulations for Ising models, and inde- scientific computing. It provides a way to draw sam- pendently by Turcin [103]. It is still a standard tool ples from a multivariate probability density f(x1,x2, of statistical physics, both for practical simulation ...,xp), perhaps only known up to a normalizing (e.g., [88]) and as a natural dynamics (e.g., [10]). constant, by a sequence of one-dimensional sampling The basic Dobrushin uniqueness theorem showing problems. From (X1,...,Xp) proceed to (X1′ , X2,..., existence of Gibbs measures was proved based on Xp), then (X1′ , X2′ , X3,...,Xp),..., (X1′ , X2′ ,...,Xp′ ) this dynamics (e.g., [54]). It was introduced as a where at the ith stage, the coordinate is sampled base for image analysis by Geman and Geman [46].
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