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The Short-Cut Metropolis Method

Radford M. Neal
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Abstract

I show how one can modify the random-walk Metropolis MCMC method in such a way that a sequence of modified Metropolis updates takes little computation time when the rejection rate is outside a desired interval. This allows one to effectively adapt the scale of the Metropolis proposal distribution, by performing several such "short-cut" Metropolis sequences with varying proposal stepsizes. Unlike other adaptive Metropolis schemes, this method converges to the correct distribution in the same fashion as the standard Metropolis method.

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Radford M. Neal. 2005-08-02. The Short-Cut Metropolis Method. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0508060

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