stability of noisy Metropolis-Hastings

Felipe Medina-Aguayo, Antony Lee and Gareth Roberts (all at Warwick University) have recently published—even though the paper was accepted a year ago—a paper in Statistics and Computing about a variant to the pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The modification is to simulate an estimate of the likelihood or posterior at the current value of the Markov chain at every iteration, rather than reproducing the current estimate. The reason for this refreshment of the weight estimate is to prevent stickiness in the chain, when a random weight leads to a very high value of the posterior. Unfortunately, this change leads to a Markov chain with the wrong stationary distribution. When this stationary exists! The paper actually produces examples of transient noisy chains, even in simple cases such as a geometric target distribution. And even when taking the average of a large number of weights. But the paper also contains sufficient conditions, like negative weight moments or uniform ergodicity of the proposal, for the noisy chain to be geometrically ergodic. Even though the applicability of those conditions to complex targets is not always obvious.