This article proposes a distributed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating Bayesian hierarchical models when the number of cross-sectional units is very large and the objects of interest are the unit-level parameters. The two-stage algorithm is asymptotically exact, retains the...

Abstract This article proposes a distributed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating Bayesian hierarchical models when the panel size is extremely large (in the millions of consumers) and the objects of interest are the distribution of heterogeneity and the parameters that...

Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior distributions. We focus on the situation where one makes use of importance sampling or the independence chain...

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. With the constant rise of computational power even very complex models can be estimated on virtually any modern computer. Moreover, interest has shifted from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models...

In several scientific fields, like bioinformatics, financial and macro-economics, important theoretical and practical issues exist that involve multimodal data distributions. We propose a Bayesian approach using mixtures distributions to approximate accurately such data distributions. Shape and...