Non-random MCMC

In my post on MCMC simulation as a random permutation (paper available at arxiv.org here), I mentioned that this view of MCMC also has implications for the role of randomness in MCMC. This has also been discussed in a recent paper by Iain Murray and Lloyd Elliott on Driving Markov chain Monte Carlo with a dependent random stream.

For the simple case of Gibbs sampling for a continuous distribution, Murray and Elliott’s procedure is the same as mine, except that they do not have the updates of extra variables needed to produce a volume-preserving map. These extra variables are relevant for my importance sampling application, but not for what I’ll discuss here. The method is a simple modification of the usual Gibbs sampling procedure, assuming that sampling from conditional distributions is done by inverting their CDFs (a common method for many standard distributions). It turns out that after this modification, one can often eliminate the random aspect of the simulation and still get good results!