Recycling Gibbs sampling
Luca Martino, V́ıctor Elvira, Gustau Camps‐Valls · 2017
Gibbs sampling is a well-known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, extensively used in signal processing, machine learning and statistics. The key point for the successful application of the Gibbs sampler is the ability to draw samples from the full-conditional probability density functions efficiently. In the general case this is not possible, so in order to speed up the convergence of the chain, it is required to generate auxiliary samples. However, such intermediate information is finally disregarded. In this work, we show that these auxiliary samples can be recycled within the Gibbs estimators, improving their efficiency with no extra cost. Theoretical and exhaustive numerical comparisons show the validity of the approach.