scale matters [maths as well]

This article is originally published at https://xianblog.wordpress.com

A question from X validated on why an independent Metropolis sampler of a three component Normal mixture based on a single Normal proposal was failing to recover the said mixture…

When looking at the OP’s R code, I did not notice anything amiss at first glance (I was about to drive back from Annecy, hence did not look too closely) and reran the attached code with a larger variance in the proposal, which returned the above picture for the MCMC sample, close enough (?) to the target. Later, from home, I checked the code further and noticed that the Metropolis ratio was only using the ratio of the targets. Dividing by the ratio of the proposals made a significant (?) to the representation of the target.

More interestingly, the OP was fundamentally confused between independent and random-walk Rosenbluth algorithms, from using the wrong ratio to aiming at the wrong scale factor and average acceptance ratio, and furthermore challenged by the very notion of Hessian matrix, which is often suggested as a default scale.

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This article is originally published at https://xianblog.wordpress.com
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