Twisting the Alive Particle Filter

This work focuses on sampling from hidden Markov models (Cappe et al. 2005) whose observations have intractable density functions. We develop a new sequential Monte Carlo (e.g. Doucet, 2011) algorithm and a new particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings (Andrieu et al J R Statist Soc Ser B 72:269-342, 2010) algorithm for these purposes. We build from Jasra et al (2013) and Whiteley and Lee (Ann Statist 42:115-141, 2014) to construct the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm, which we call the alive twisted particle filter. Like the alive particle filter (Amrein and Künsch, 2011, Jasra et al, 2013), our new SMC algorithm adopts an approximate Bayesian computation (Tavare et al. Genetics 145:505-518, 1997) estimate of the HMM. Our alive twisted particle filter also uses a twisted proposal as in Whiteley and Lee (Ann Statist 42:115-141, 2014) to obtain a low-variance estimate of the HMM normalising constant. We demonstrate via numerical examples that, in some scenarios, this estimate has a much lower variance than that of the estimate obtained via the alive particle filter. The low variance of this normalising constant estimate encourages the implementation of our SMC algorithm within a particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings (PMMH) scheme, and we call the resulting methodology “alive twisted PMMH”. We numerically demonstrate, on a stochastic volatility model, how our alive twisted PMMH can converge faster than the standard alive PMMH of Jasra et al (2013).