Graph-Enabled Fast MCMC Sampling with an Unknown High-Dimensional Prior Distribution

Abstract: Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice, the prior distribution can be high-dimensional, adding to the difficulty of efficient posterior inference. In this paper, we propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which we term graph-enabled MCMC, for posterior sampling with unknown and potentially high-dimensional prior distributions. The algorithm is based on constructing a geometric graph from prior samples and subsequently uses the graph structure to guide the transition of the Markov chain. Through extensive theoretical and numerical studies, we demonstrate that our graph-enabled MCMC algorithm provides reliable approximation to the posterior distribution and is highly computationally efficient.