austerity in MCMC land

Anoop Korattikara, Yutian Chen and Max Welling recently arXived a paper on the appeal of using only part of the data to speed up MCMC. This is different from the growing literature on unbiased estimators of the likelihood exemplified by Andrieu & Roberts (2009). Here, the approximation to the true target is akin to the approximation in ABC algorithms in that a value of the parameter is accepted if the difference in the likelihoods is larger than a given bound. Expressing this perspective as a test on the mean of the log likelihood leads the authors to use instead a subsample from the whole sample. (The approximation level ε is then a bound on the p-value.) While this idea only applies to iid settings, it is quite interesting and sounds a wee bit like a bootstrapped version of MCMC. Especially since it sounds as if it could provide an auto-evaluation of its error.