Fredrik Lindsten, Michael I Jordan, Thomas B Schön
Linköping University; University of California; Linköping University
Poster: Ancestor Sampling for Particle Gibbs
7:00pm - 12:00am Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Harrah’s Special Events Center 2nd Floor
This is part of the Poster Session which begins at 19:00 on Wednesday December 5, 2012
W23
We present a novel method in the family of particle MCMC methods that we refer to as particle Gibbs with ancestor sampling (PG-AS). Similarly to the existing PG with backward simulation (PG-BS) procedure, we use backward sampling to (considerably) improve the mixing of the PG kernel. Instead of using separate forward and backward sweeps as in PG-BS, however, we achieve the same effect in a single forward sweep. We apply the PG-AS framework to the challenging class of non-Markovian state-space models. We develop a truncation strategy of these models that is applicable in principle to any backward-simulation-based method, but which is particularly well suited to the PG-AS framework. In particular, as we show in a simulation study, PG-AS can yield an order-of-magnitude improved accuracy relative to PG-BS due to its robustness to the truncation error. Several application examples are discussed, including Rao-Blackwellized particle smoothing and inference in degenerate state-space models.