MC's for MCMC'ists |
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Authors: | Esa Nummelin |
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Affiliation: | University of Helsinki, Finland |
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Abstract: | We develop a minimum amount of theory of Markov chains at as low a level of abstraction as possible in order to prove two fundamental probability laws for standard Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms: 1. The law of large numbers explains why the algorithm works: it states that the empirical means calculated from the samples converge towards their "true" expected values, viz. expectations with respect to the invariant distribution of the associated Markov chain (=the target distribution of the simulation). 2. The central limit theorem expresses the deviations of the empirical means from their expected values in terms of asymptotically normally distributed random variables. We also present a formula and an estimator for the associated variance. |
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Keywords: | Markov chain Monte Carlo Convergence Central limit theorem |
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