We introduce a general form of sequential Monte Carlo algorithm defined in terms of a parameterized resampling mechanism. We find that a suitably generalized notion of the Effective Sample Size (ESS), widely used to monitor algorithm degeneracy, appears naturally in a study of its convergence properties. We are then able to phrase sufficient conditions for time-uniform convergence in terms of algorithmic control of the ESS, in turn achievable by adaptively modulating the interaction between particles. This leads us to suggest novel algorithms which are, in senses to be made precise, provably stable and yet designed to avoid the degree of interaction which hinders parallelization of standard algorithms. As a byproduct, we prove time-uniform convergence of the popular adaptive resampling particle filter.

Throughout recent years, various sequential Monte Carlo methods, i.e. particle filters, have been widely applied to various applications involving the evaluation of the generally intractable stochastic discrete-time filter. Although convergence results exist for finite-time intervals, a stronger form of convergence, namely, uniform convergence, is required for bounding the error on an infinite-time interval. In this paper we prove easily verifiable conditions for the filter applications that are sufficient for the uniform convergence of certain particle filters. Essentially, the conditions require the observations to be accurate enough. No mixing or ergodicity conditions are imposed on the signal process.

Abstract.Recently, it has been pointed out by several authors that the uniform convergence of the stochastic discrete time filter approximations, such as particle filters, is closely related to the stability of the exact filter. This work provides easily verifiable conditions on the signal and observation model that ensure a certain level of stability for the exact filter. Essentially, the conditions are imposed on the tails of the signal and observation noise distributions. For sufficiently light tailed observation noise, the filter is shown to be stable.

Abstract-Twisted particle filters are a class of sequential Monte Carlo methods recently introduced by Whiteley and Lee [1] to improve the efficiency of marginal likelihood estimation in state-space models. The purpose of this article is to extend the twisted particle filtering methodology, establish accessible theoretical results which convey its rationale, and provide a demonstration of its practical performance within particle Markov chain Monte Carlo for estimating static model parameters. We derive twisted particle filters that incorporate systematic or multinomial resampling and information from historical particle states, and a transparent proof which identifies the optimal algorithm for marginal likelihood estimation. We demonstrate how to approximate the optimal algorithm for nonlinear state-space models with Gaussian noise and we apply such approximations to two examples: a range and bearing tracking problem and an indoor positioning problem with Bluetooth signal strength measurements. We demonstrate improvements over standard algorithms in terms of variance of marginal likelihood estimates and Markov chain autocorrelation for given CPU time, and improved tracking performance using estimated parameters.Index Terms-Particle filter, sequential Monte Carlo, particle MCMC, Gaussian state-space model, parameter estimation.

We study a distributed particle filter proposed by Bolić et al. (2005). This algorithm involves m groups of M particles, with interaction between groups occurring through a "local exchange" mechanism. We establish a central limit theorem in the regime where M is fixed and m → ∞. A formula we obtain for the asymptotic variance can be interpreted in terms of colliding Markov chains, enabling analytic and numerical evaluations of how the asymptotic variance behaves over time, with comparison to a benchmark algorithm consisting of m independent particle filters. We prove that subject to regularity conditions, when m is fixed both algorithms converge time-uniformly at rate M −1/2 . Through use of our asymptotic variance formula we give counter-examples satisfying the same regularity conditions to show that when M is fixed neither algorithm, in general, converges time-uniformly at rate m −1/2 .

We present a new Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, implemented in software Arbores, for inferring the history of a sample of DNA sequences. Our principal innovation is a bridging procedure, previously applied only for simple stochastic processes, in which the local computations within a bridge can proceed independently of the rest of the DNA sequence, facilitating large-scale parallelisation.

We observe an undirected graph G without multiple edges and self-loops, which is to represent a protein–protein interaction (PPI) network. We assume that G evolved under the duplication–mutation with complementarity (DMC) model from a seed graph, G0, and we also observe the binary forest Γ that represents the duplication history of G. A posterior density for the DMC model parameters is established, and we outline a sampling strategy by which one can perform Bayesian inference; that sampling strategy employs a particle marginal Metropolis–Hastings (PMMH) algorithm. We test our methodology on numerical examples to demonstrate a high accuracy and precision in the inference of the DMC model's mutation and homodimerization parameters.

Bootstrap particle filter (BPF) is the corner stone of many popular algorithms used for solving inference problems involving time series that are observed through noisy measurements in a non-linear and non-Gaussian context. The long term stability of BPF arises from particle interactions which in the context of modern parallel computing systems typically means that particle information needs to be communicated between processing elements, which makes parallel implementation of BPF nontrivial.In this paper we show that it is possible to constrain the interactions in a way which, under some assumptions, enables the reduction of the cost of communicating the particle information while still preserving the consistency and the long term stability of the BPF. Numerical experiments demonstrate that although the imposed constraints introduce additional error, the proposed method shows potential to be the method of choice in certain settings.