online approximate Bayesian learning

My friends and coauthors Matthieu Gerber and Randal Douc have just arXived a massive paper on online approximate Bayesian learning, namely the handling of the posterior distribution on the parameters of a state-space model, which remains a challenge to this day… Starting from the iterated batch importance sampling (IBIS) algorithm of Nicolas (Chopin, 2002) which he introduced in his PhD thesis. The online (“by online we mean that the memory and computational requirement to process each observation is finite and bounded uniformly in t”) method they construct is guaranteed for the approximate posterior to converge to the (pseudo-)true value of the parameter as the sample size grows to infinity, where the sequence of approximations is a Cesaro mixture of initial approximations with Gaussian or t priors, AMIS like. (I am somewhat uncertain about the notion of a sequence of priors used in this setup. Another funny feature is the necessity to consider a fat tail t prior from time to time in this sequence!) The sequence is in turn approximated by a particle filter. The computational cost of this IBIS is roughly in O(NT), depending on the regeneration rate.

wildlife photograph of the year [2015]