Exact Sampling for Intractable Probability Distributions via a Bernoulli Factory

• Activity Number: 583
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): James M. Flegal*+
• Companies: University of California at Riverside
• Keywords: Markov chain ; Monte Carlo ; Perfect sampling ; Gibbs sampler

Abstract

Many applications in the field of statistics require Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Determining appropriate starting values and run lengths can be both analytically and empirically challenging. A desire to overcome these problems has led to the development of exact, or perfect, sampling algorithms which convert a Markov chain into an algorithm that produces i.i.d. samples from the stationary distribution. Unfortunately, very few of these algorithms have been developed for the intractable distributions that arise in statistical applications, which typically have uncountable support. Here we study an exact sampling algorithm using a geometrically ergodic Markov chain on a general state space. Our work provides a practical implementation of a previously studied rejection sampling approach. To this end, we provide an explicit bound for the proposal distribution and implement the Bernoulli factory. We illustrate the algorithm on a bivariate Gibbs sampler.