Auxiliary MCMC and particle Gibbs samplers for parallelisable inference in latent dynamical systems
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We introduce two new classes of exact Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers for inference in latent dynamical models. The first one, which we coin auxiliary Kalman samplers, relies on finding a linear Gaussian state-space model approximation around the running trajectory corresponding to the state of the Markov chain. The second, that we name auxiliary particle Gibbs samplers corresponds to deriving good local proposals in an auxiliary Feynman–Kac model for use in particle Gibbs. Both samplers are controlled by augmenting the target distribution with auxiliary observations, resulting in an efficient Gibbs sampling routine. We discuss the relative statistical and computational performance of the samplers introduced, and show how to parallelise the auxiliary samplers along the time dimension. We illustrate the respective benefits and drawbacks of the resulting algorithms on classical examples from the particle filtering literature.
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