Adaptive Mixture of Student-t Distributions as a Flexible Candidate Distribution for Efficient Simulation: The R Package AdMit

Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.1-32, Jan 2009

32 Pages Posted: 23 Jun 2008 Last revised: 3 Aug 2018

See all articles by David Ardia

David Ardia

HEC Montreal - Department of Decision Sciences

Lennart F. Hoogerheide

VU University Amsterdam

H. K. van Dijk

Tinbergen Institute; Econometric Institute

Date Written: June 18, 2008

Abstract

This paper presents the R package AdMit which provides functions to approximate and sample from a certain target distribution given only a kernel of the target density function. The core algorithm consists in the function AdMit which fits an adaptive mixture of Student-t distributions to the density of interest via its kernel function. Then, importance sampling or the independence chain Metropolis- Hastings algorithm are used to obtain quantities of interest for the target density, using the fitted mixture as the importance or candidate density. The estimation procedure is fully automatic and thus avoids the time-consuming and difficult task of tuning a sampling algorithm. The relevance of the package is shown in two examples. The first aims at illustrating in detail the use of the functions provided by the package in a bivariate bimodal distribution. The second shows the relevance of the adaptive mixture procedure through the Bayesian estimation of a mixture of ARCH model fitted to foreign exchange log-returns data. The methodology is compared to standard cases of importance sampling and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm using a naive candidate and with the Griddy-Gibbs approach.

Keywords: adaptive mixture, Student-t distributions, importance sampling, independence chain Metropolis-Hasting algorithm, Bayesian, R software

JEL Classification: C11, C15

Suggested Citation

Ardia, David and Hoogerheide, Lennart F. and van Dijk, Herman K., Adaptive Mixture of Student-t Distributions as a Flexible Candidate Distribution for Efficient Simulation: The R Package AdMit (June 18, 2008). Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.1-32, Jan 2009, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1150062

David Ardia (Contact Author)

HEC Montreal - Department of Decision Sciences ( email )

3000 Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road
Montreal, QC H2S1L4
Canada

Lennart F. Hoogerheide

VU University Amsterdam ( email )

De Boelelaan 1105
Amsterdam, ND North Holland 1081 HV
Netherlands

Herman K. Van Dijk

Tinbergen Institute ( email )

Gustav Mahlerplein 117
Burg. Oudlaan 50
Amsterdam/Rotterdam, 1082 MS
Netherlands
+31104088955 (Phone)
+31104089031 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://people.few.eur.nl/hkvandijk/

Econometric Institute ( email )

P.O. Box 1738
3000 DR Rotterdam
Netherlands
+31 10 4088955 (Phone)
+31 10 4527746 (Fax)

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
162
Abstract Views
1,268
Rank
331,086
PlumX Metrics