International Conference on Monte Carlo techniques
Closing conference of thematic cycle

Paris July 5-8th 2016 
Campus les cordeliers
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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling for Wishart distributions with eigenvalue constraints
Alexander Buchholz  1@  , Nicolas Chopin  2@  
1 : Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique  (CREST)  -  Website
INSEE, École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique
2 : ENSAE  (ENSAE)  -  Website
ENSAE ParisTech

Sampling from constrained target spaces for Bayesian inference is a non-trivial problem. A recent development has been the use of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in combination with particle re ection, see [Pakman and Paninski, 2014]. However, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is sensitive to several hyper parameters, that need to be tuned, to ensure an ecient sampler. For this purpose, [Wang et al., 2013] suggested a black box algorithm that handles this problem. Our approach is to combine the two former ideas to solve the problem of sampling Wishart distributed matrices with eigen-value constraints. Therefore, we exploit the eigenvalue decomposition of positive de nite matrices. The suggested method performs better than the initial sampler of [Everson and Morris, 2000b] when the dimension of the target space grows. Important applications of our sampler are the normal hierarchical model of [Everson and Morris, 2000a] and the rank test in a principal component analysis as in [Choi et al., 2014].


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