In a sort of echo from an earlier post, I received this emailed question from Gabriel:
I am contacting you in connection with my internship and your book «Le choix bayésien» where I cannot find an answer to my question. Given a constrained parameter space and an unconstrained Markov chain, is it correct to subsample the chain in order to keep only those points that satisfy the constraint?
To which I replied that this would induce a bias in the outcome, even though this is a marginally valid argument (if the Markov chain is in its stationary regime, picking one value at random from those satisfying the constraint is akin to accept-reject). The unbiased approach is to resort to Metropolis-Hastings steps in Gabriel’s Gibbs sampler to check whether or not each proposed move stays within the constrained space. If not, one need to replicate the current value of the chain…
Update: Following comments by Ajay and David, I withdraw the term “bias”. The method works as a low key accept-reject but can be very inefficient, to the extent of having no visit to the constrained set. (However, in the event of a practically/numerically disconnected support with a huge gap between the connected components, it may also be more efficient than a low energy Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Mileage may vary!)
Xi'an's Og 