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Local degeneracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods∗
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2014
Abstract
We study asymptotic behavior of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedures. Sometimes theperformances of MCMC procedures are poor and there are great importance for the study ofsuch behavior. In this paper we call degeneracy for a particular type of poorperformances. We show some equivalent conditions for degeneracy. As an application, weconsider the cumulative probit model. It is well known that the natural data augmentation(DA) procedure does not work well for this model and the so-called parameter-expanded dataaugmentation (PX-DA) procedure is considered to be a remedy for it. In the sense ofdegeneracy, the PX-DA procedure is better than the DA procedure. However, when the numberof categories is large, both procedures are degenerate and so the PX-DA procedure may notprovide good estimate for the posterior distribution.
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- © EDP Sciences, SMAI 2014
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