Moving Target Monte Carlo
This addresses efficiency issues in Bayesian inference for researchers and practitioners using MCMC, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing sampling frameworks.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of evaluating posterior distributions in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods by introducing Moving Target Monte Carlo (MTMC), a non-Markovian algorithm that uses an iteratively updated approximation to reduce evaluations, with proofs of convergence and rate estimates provided.
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires evaluating the posterior distribution $p(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{d})$ of the proposed candidate $\mathbf{x}$ at each iteration when constructing the acceptance rate. This is costly when such evaluations are intractable. In this paper, we introduce a new non-Markovian sampling algorithm called Moving Target Monte Carlo (MTMC). The acceptance rate at $n$-th iteration is constructed using an iteratively updated approximation of the posterior distribution $a_n(\mathbf{x})$ instead of $p(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{d})$. The true value of the posterior $p(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{d})$ is only calculated if the candidate $\mathbf{x}$ is accepted. The approximation $a_n$ utilises these evaluations and converges to $p$ as $n \rightarrow \infty$. A proof of convergence and estimation of convergence rate in different situations are given.