importance sampling schemes for evidence approximation [revised]

After a rather intense period of new simulations and versions, Juong Een (Kate) Lee and I have now resubmitted our paper on (some) importance sampling schemes for evidence approximation in mixture models to Bayesian Analysis. There is no fundamental change in the new version but rather a more detailed description of what those importance schemes mean in practice. The original idea in the paper is to improve upon the Rao-Blackwellisation solution proposed by Berkoff et al. (2002) and later by Marin et al. (2005) to avoid the impact of label switching on Chib’s formula. The Rao-Blackwellisation consists in averaging over all permutations of the labels while the improvement relies on the elimination of useless permutations, namely those that produce a negligible conditional density in Chib’s (candidate’s) formula. While the improvement implies truncated the overall sum and hence induces a potential bias (which was the concern of one referee), the determination of the irrelevant permutations after relabelling next to a single mode does not appear to cause any bias, while reducing the computational overload. Referees also made us aware of many recent proposals that conduct to different evidence approximations, albeit not directly related with our purpose. (One was Rodrigues and Walker, 2014, discussed and commented in a recent post.)