Assessing and Improving MCMC
Paul Fearnhead, Christopher Nemeth, Chris J. Oates, Chris Sherlock · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025
The development of more sophisticated and, especially, approximate sampling algorithms aimed at improving scalability in one or more of the senses already discussed in this book raises important considerations about how a suitable algorithm should be selected for a given task, how its tuning parameters should be determined, and how its convergence should be as- sessed. This chapter presents recent solutions to the above problems, whose starting point is to derive explicit upper bounds on an appropriate distance between the posterior and the approximation produced by MCMC. Further, we explain how these same tools can be adapted to provide powerful post-processing methods that can be used retrospectively to improve approximations produced using scalable MCMC.