5 Day 5 (January 31)

5.1 Announcements

  • Please read (and re-read) Ch. 4 in BBM2L
    • You may want to take a look at Ch. 6
    • We will skip Ch. 5
  • Assignment 2
    • Review Eq. 3.1 in BBM2L
    • General MC integration using uniform dist
    • Don’t go to extreme lengths to make the programing more difficult
    • With MC integration, the most important skill is to know what integral you are approximating
    • I will not be posting a guide to Assignment 2
  • Final project is posted
    • Proposals are due Feb. 17
  • Assignment 3 is due Sunday Feb. 5

5.2 Introduction to Metropolis-Hastings algorithm

  • Why use a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm?
    • Original work (see link and link)
    • Only need to know a function that is proportional to the PDF/PMF
    • Why this is such a big deal for Bayesian statistics?
    • What else do we need to unlock the power of Bayesian?
  • What we loose by using a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm
    • Requires a bit more programming and supervision/checking
    • Correlated samples vs. independent samples
    • Burn-in interval
  • Live illustration using example from homework 2 and 3