Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Possible biases induced by MCMC convergence.
AU - Cowles, K.
AU - Roberts, G. O.
AU - Rosenthal, S.
PY - 1999
Y1 - 1999
N2 - Convergence diagnostics are widely used to determine how many initial “burn-in” iterations should be discarded from the output of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler in the hope that the remaining samples are representative of the target distribution of interest. This paper demonstrates that some ways of applying convergence diagnostics may actually introduce bias into estimation based on the sampler output. To avoid this possibility, we recommend choosing the number of burn-in iterations r by applying convergence diagnostics to one or more pilot chains, and then basing estimation and inference on a separate long chain from which the first r iterations have been discarded.
AB - Convergence diagnostics are widely used to determine how many initial “burn-in” iterations should be discarded from the output of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler in the hope that the remaining samples are representative of the target distribution of interest. This paper demonstrates that some ways of applying convergence diagnostics may actually introduce bias into estimation based on the sampler output. To avoid this possibility, we recommend choosing the number of burn-in iterations r by applying convergence diagnostics to one or more pilot chains, and then basing estimation and inference on a separate long chain from which the first r iterations have been discarded.
KW - Markov chain Monte Carlo
KW - convergence diagnostic
KW - estimation
KW - bias
KW - batch means
U2 - 10.1080/00949659908811968
DO - 10.1080/00949659908811968
M3 - Journal article
VL - 64
SP - 87
EP - 104
JO - Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation
JF - Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation
SN - 1563-5163
IS - 1
ER -