English

A Gibbs sampler on the $n$-simplex

Probability 2014-01-16 v2 Computation

Abstract

We determine the mixing time of a simple Gibbs sampler on the unit simplex, confirming a conjecture of Aldous. The upper bound is based on a two-step coupling, where the first step is a simple contraction argument and the second step is a non-Markovian coupling. We also present a MCMC-based perfect sampling algorithm based on our proof which can be applied with Gibbs samplers that are harder to analyze.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1107.5829,
  title  = {A Gibbs sampler on the $n$-simplex},
  author = {Aaron Smith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.5829},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AAP916 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:43:40.666Z