recycling Gibbs auxiliaries [a reply]

[Here is a reply sent to me by Luca Martino, Victor Elvira, and Gustau Camp-Vallis, after my earlier comments on their paper.]

We provide our contribution to the discussion, reporting our experience with the application of Metropolis-within-Gibbs schemes. Since in literature there are miscellaneous opinions, we want to point out the following considerations:

– according to our experience, the use of M>1 steps of the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) method for drawing from each full-conditional (with or without recycling), decreases the MSE of the estimation (see code Ex1-Ex2 and related Figure 7(b) and Figures 8). If the corresponding full conditional is very concentrated, one possible solution is to applied an adaptive or automatic MH for drawing from this full-conditional (it can require the use of M internal steps; see references in Section 3.2).

– Fixing the number of evaluations of the posterior, the comparison between a longer Gibbs chain with a single step of MH and a shorter Gibbs chain with M>1 steps of MH per each full-conditional, is required. Generally, there is no clear winner. The better performance depends on different aspects: the specific scenario, if and adaptive MH is employed or not, if the recycling is applied or not (see Figure 10(a) and the corresponding code Ex2).

The previous considerations are supported/endorsed by several authors (see the references in Section 3.2). In order to highlight the number of controversial opinions about the MH-within-Gibbs implementation, we report a last observation:

– If it is possible to draw directly from the full-conditionals, of course this is the best scenario (this is our belief). Remarkably, as also reported in Chapter 1, page 393 of the book “Monte Carlo Statistical Methods”, C. Robert and Casella, 2004, some authors have found that a “bad” choice of the proposal function in the MH step (i.e., different from the full conditional, or a poor approximation of it) can improve the performance of the MH-within-Gibbs sampler. Namely, they assert that a more “precise” approximation of the full-conditional does not necessarily improve the overall performance. In our opinion, this is possibly due to the fact that the acceptance rate in the MH step (lower than 1) induces an “accidental” random scan of the components of the target pdf in the Gibbs sampler, which can improve the performance in some cases. In our work, for the simplicity, we only focus on the deterministic scan. However, a random scan could be also considered.