Gibbs sampling has had great success in the analysis of mixture models. In particular, the “latent variable” formulation of the mixture model greatly reduces computational complexity. However, one failing of this approach is the possible existence of almost-absorbing states, called trapping...

Importance sampling methods can be iterated like MCMC algorithms, while being more robust against dependence and starting values. The population Monte Carlo principle consists of iterated generations of importance samples, with importance functions depending on the previously generated...

En estimation bayésienne, lorsque le calcul explicite de la loi a posteriori du vecteur des paramètres à estimer est impossible, les méthodes de Monte-Carlo par chaînes de Markov (MCMC) [Robert and Casella, 1999] permettent théoriquement de fournir un échantillon approximativement...

Reversible jump methods are the most commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo tool for exploring variable dimension statistical models. Recently, however, an alternative approach based on birth-and-death processes has been proposed by Stephens for mixtures of distributions. We show that the...

In 1996, Propp and Wilson introduced coupling from the past (CFTP), an algorithm for generating a sample from the exact stationary distribution of a Markov chain. In 1998, Fill proposed another so–called perfect sampling algorithm. These algorithms have enormous potential in Markov Chain Monte...

Missing variable models are typical benchmarks for new computational techniques in that the ill-posed nature of missing variable models offer a challenging testing ground for these techniques. This was the case for the EM algorithm and the Gibbs sampler, and this is also true for importance...

Our aim is to analyze the link between optimism and risk aversion in a subjective expected utility setting and to estimate the average level of optimism when weighted by risk tolerance. Its estimation leads to a non-trivial statistical problem. We start from a large lottery survey (1536...