Bayesian methods
Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is a general-purpose Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for drawing samples from any probability distribution whose density can be evaluated up to a normalising constant. Introduced by Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953) in computational physics and generalised by Hastings (1970) to asymmetric proposal distributions, it is the foundational algorithm from which nearly all subsequent MCMC samplers — Gibbs sampling, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, slice sampling — are derived or can be viewed as special cases.
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Sources
- Metropolis, N., Rosenbluth, A. W., Rosenbluth, M. N., Teller, A. H., & Teller, E. (1953). Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 21(6), 1087–1092. DOI: 10.1063/1.1699114 ↗
- Hastings, W. K. (1970). Monte Carlo sampling methods using Markov chains and their applications. Biometrika, 57(1), 97–109. DOI: 10.1093/biomet/57.1.97 ↗
- Robert, C. P., & Casella, G. (2004). Monte Carlo Statistical Methods (2nd ed.). Springer. ISBN: 978-0-387-21239-5
- Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S., Dunson, D. B., Vehtari, A., & Rubin, D. B. (2013). Bayesian Data Analysis (3rd ed.). CRC Press. ISBN: 978-1-439-84095-5