Unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo with couplings
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Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent approximations of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. However, MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations, which complicates both parallel computation and the construction of confidence intervals. We propose to remove this bias by using couplings of Markov chains and a telescopic sum argument, inspired by Glynn & Rhee (2014). The resulting unbiased estimators can be computed independently in parallel, and confidence intervals can be directly constructed from the Central Limit Theorem for i.i.d. variables. We provide practical couplings for important algorithms such as the Metropolis-Hastings and Gibbs samplers. We establish the theoretical validity of the proposed estimators, and study their variances and computational costs. In numerical experiments, including inference in hierarchical models, bimodal or high-dimensional target distributions, logistic regressions with the Pólya-Gamma Gibbs sampler and the Bayesian Lasso, we demonstrate the wide applicability of the proposed methodology as well as its limitations. Finally, we illustrate how the proposed estimators can approximate the "cut" distribution that arises in Bayesian inference for misspecified models.
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