scale matters [maths as well]

[This article was first published on R – Xi'an's Og, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

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.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Xi'an's Og.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)