Weighted Riesz Particles

Abstract: Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are simulated by local exploration of complex statistical distributions, and while bypassing the cumbersome requirement of a specific analytical expression for the target, this stochastic exploration of an uncertain parameter space comes at the expense of a large number of samples, and this computational complexity increases with parameter dimensionality. Although at the exploration level, some methods are proposed to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm, such as tempering, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Rao-redwellization, and scalable methods for better performance, it cannot avoid the stochastic nature of this exploration. We consider the target distribution as a mapping where the infinite-dimensional Eulerian space of the parameters consists of a number of deterministic submanifolds and propose a generalized energy metric, termed weighted Riesz energy, where a number of points is generated through pairwise interactions, to discretize rectifiable submanifolds. We study the properties of the point, called Riesz particle, and embed it into sequential MCMC, and we find that there will be higher acceptance rates with fewer evaluations, we validate it through experimental comparative analysis from a linear Gaussian state-space model with synthetic data and a non-linear stochastic volatility model with real-world data.