Following an earlier submission to Statistical Science, we have now resubmitted and arXived the new version of our paper “Improving the convergence properties of the Data Augmentation algorithm with an application to Bayesian mixture modelling”, written with Jim Hobert (University of Florida), and Vivek Roy (Iowa State University). Given that both referees were quite positive about the earlier version, the changes are truly minor and overwhelmingly stylistic. Again, I am I am very glad to be part of this paper because of the results but also because it relates to a problem I discussed at length with Richard Tweedie when I visited him in Colorado in 1993… (The above picture of Richard, along with Gareth Roberts and Anto Mira, was taken during the TMR Workshop on Computational and Spatial Statistics I organised in Aussois in 1998, with unfortunately no remaining webpage! A pre-MCMC’ski of sorts, when I had not yet started skiing!)
Archive for Aussois
Improving convergence of Data Augmentation algorithms
Posted in Mountains, Statistics, University life with tags Aussois, convergence, Data augmentation, mixture estimation, Statistical Science on June 7, 2011 by xi'anParallel computation [back]
Posted in R, Statistics, University life with tags Aussois, independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, JCGS, O'Bayes, parallel processing, R, Rao-Blackwellisation on February 13, 2011 by xi'an
We have now received reports back from JCGS for our parallel MCMC paper and they all are very nice and supportive! The reviewers essentially all like the Rao-Blackwellisation concept we developed in the paper and ask for additions towards a more concrete feeling for the practical consequences of the method. We should thus be able to manage a revision in the coming week or so. Especially because we have had further ideas about the extension of the method to regular Metropolis-Hastings algorithms like the random walk avatar. (The above picture is completely unrelated with the paper, but conveys some feeling of parallelism. I made it [in R] for the poster of the O’Bayes 03 meeting I organised in Aussois in 2003.)
