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Huguet, Guillaume
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Faculty of Arts and Science - Department of Mathematics and Statistics
André-Aisenstadt Office 4237
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Étude d'algorithmes de simulation par chaînes de Markov non réversibles
Theses and supervised dissertations / 2020-10
Huguet, Guillaume
Abstract
Abstract
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly use chains that respect the detailed
balance condition. These chains are called reversible. Most of the theory developed for
MCMC evolves around those particular chains. Peskun (1973) and Tierney (1998) provided
useful theorems on the ordering of the asymptotic variances for two estimators produced by
two different reversible chains.
In this thesis, we are interested in non-reversible chains, which are chains that don’t
respect the detailed balance condition. We present algorithms that simulate non-reversible
chains, mainly the Guided Random Walk (GRW) by Gustafson (1998) and the Discrete
Bouncy Particle Sampler (DBPS) by Sherlock and Thiery (2017). For both algorithms, we
compare the asymptotic variance of estimators with the ones produced by the Metropolis-
Hastings algorithm.
We present a recent theoretical framework introduced by Andrieu and Livingstone (2019)
and their analysis of the GRW. We then show that the DBPS is part of this framework
and present an analysis on the asymptotic variance of estimators. Their main theorem
can provide an ordering of the asymptotic variances of two estimators resulting from nonreversible
chains. We show that an estimator could have a lower asymptotic variance by
adding propositions to the DBPS. We then present empirical results of a modified DBPS.
Through the thesis we will mostly be interested in chains that are produced by deterministic
proposals. We show a general construction of the delayed rejection algorithm using
deterministic proposals and one possible equivalent for non-reversible chains.