English

An n-dimensional Rosenbrock Distribution for MCMC Testing

Computation 2020-05-08 v4 Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

The Rosenbrock function is an ubiquitous benchmark problem for numerical optimisation, and variants have been proposed to test the performance of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. In this work we discuss the two-dimensional Rosenbrock density, its current nn-dimensional extensions, and their advantages and limitations. We then propose a new extension to arbitrary dimensions called the Hybrid Rosenbrock distribution, which is composed of conditional normal kernels arranged in such a way that preserves the key features of the original kernel. Moreover, due to its structure, the Hybrid Rosenbrock distribution is analytically tractable and possesses several desirable properties, which make it an excellent test model for computational algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.09556,
  title  = {An n-dimensional Rosenbrock Distribution for MCMC Testing},
  author = {Filippo Pagani and Martin Wiegand and Saralees Nadarajah},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09556},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:16:27.041Z