2014/07/31 by Johannes Buchner · 4 citations
Mathematics · #stat.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11222-014-9512-y
11 pages, 7 figures. Published in Statistics and Computing, Springer, September 2014
arxiv created 2014/12/02 · arxiv updated 2014/12/03
Nested sampling is an iterative integration procedure that shrinks the prior volume towards higher likelihoods by removing a "live" point at a time. A replacement point is drawn uniformly from the prior above an ever-increasing likelihood threshold. Thus, the problem of drawing from a space above a certain likelihood value arises naturally in nested sampling, making algorithms that solve this problem a key ingredient to the nested sampling framework. If the drawn points are distributed uniformly, the removal of a point shrinks the volume in a well-understood way, and the integration of nested sampling is unbiased. In this work, I develop a statistical test to check whether this is the case. This "Shrinkage Test" is useful to verify nested sampling algorithms in a controlled environment. I apply the shrinkage test to a test-problem, and show that some existing algorithms fail to pass it due to over-optimisation. I then demonstrate that a simple algorithm can be constructed which is robust against this type of problem. This RADFRIENDS algorithm is, however, inefficient in comparison to MULTINEST.