importance sampling with multiple MCMC sequences

Vivek Roy, Aixian Tan and James Flegal arXived a new paper, Estimating standard errors for importance sampling estimators with multiple Markov chains, where they obtain a central limit theorem and hence standard error estimates when using several MCMC chains to simulate from a mixture distribution as an importance sampling function. Just before I boarded my plane from Amsterdam to Calgary, which gave me the opportunity to read it completely (along with half a dozen other papers, since it is a long flight!) I first thought it was connecting to our AMIS algorithm (on which convergence Vivek spent a few frustrating weeks when he visited me at the end of his PhD), because of the mixture structure. This is actually altogether different, in that a mixture is made of unnormalised complex enough densities, to act as an importance sampler, and that, due to this complexity, the components can only be simulated via separate MCMC algorithms. Behind this characterisation lurks the challenging problem of estimating multiple normalising constants. The paper adopts the resolution by reverse logistic regression advocated in Charlie Geyer’s famous 1994 unpublished technical report. Beside the technical difficulties in establishing a CLT in this convoluted setup, the notion of mixing importance sampling and different Markov chains is quite appealing, especially in the domain of “tall” data and of splitting the likelihood in several or even many bits, since the mixture contains most of the information provided by the true posterior and can be corrected by an importance sampling step. In this very setting, I also think more adaptive schemes could be found to determine (estimate?!) the optimal weights of the mixture components.