论文标题
通过本地平衡来改善多种尝试的大都市
Improving multiple-try Metropolis with local balancing
论文作者
论文摘要
多尝试的大都市(MTM)是一种流行的马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛法,具有可与平行计算相吻合的吸引力。在每次迭代中,它为马尔可夫链的下一个状态采样了几个候选物,并根据权重函数随机选择其中一个。规范的重量函数与目标密度成正比。我们从理论和经验上都表明,这种重量功能在高维度中诱导病理行为,尤其是在收敛阶段。我们建议使用类似于Zanella(2020)局部平衡的建议分布的权重函数,从而产生没有表现出这些病理行为的MTM算法。为了理论分析这些算法,我们研究了理想方案的高维度性能,可以将其视为MTM算法,这些算法在每种迭代时采样了无限数量的候选者,以及此类方案与MTM算法之间的差异,这些算法和MTM算法有限数量的候选者数量。我们的分析揭示了收敛和固定阶段之间的强烈区别:在前者中,局部平衡对于实现快速收敛至关重要,而在后者中,规范和新颖的重量功能产生了相似的性能。数值实验包括涉及计算廉价的正向模型的精确医学的应用,该应用程序在MTM迭代中使用并行计算有益。
Multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the appealing feature of being amenable to parallel computing. At each iteration, it samples several candidates for the next state of the Markov chain and randomly selects one of them based on a weight function. The canonical weight function is proportional to the target density. We show both theoretically and empirically that this weight function induces pathological behaviours in high dimensions, especially during the convergence phase. We propose to instead use weight functions akin to the locally-balanced proposal distributions of Zanella (2020), thus yielding MTM algorithms that do not exhibit those pathological behaviours. To theoretically analyse these algorithms, we study the high-dimensional performance of ideal schemes that can be thought of as MTM algorithms which sample an infinite number of candidates at each iteration, as well as the discrepancy between such schemes and the MTM algorithms which sample a finite number of candidates. Our analysis unveils a strong distinction between the convergence and stationary phases: in the former, local balancing is crucial and effective to achieve fast convergence, while in the latter, the canonical and novel weight functions yield similar performance. Numerical experiments include an application in precision medicine involving a computationally-expensive forward model, which makes the use of parallel computing within MTM iterations beneficial.