Particle filtering within adaptive Metropolis Hastings sampling

Abstract

We show that it is feasible to carry out exact Bayesian inference for non-Gaussian state space models using an adaptive Metropolis Hastings sampling scheme with the likelihood approximated by the particle filter. Furthermore, an adapyive independent Metropolis Hastings sampler based on a mixture of normals proposal is computationally much more efficient than an adaptive random walk proposal because the cost of constructing a good adaptive proposal is negligible compared to the cost of approximating the likelihood. Independent Metropolis Hastings proposals are also attractive because they are easy to run in parallel on multiple processors. We also show that when the particle filter is used, the marginal likelihood of any model is obtained in an efficient and unbiased manner, making model comparison straightforward.