A fast asynchronous MCMC sampler for sparse Bayesian inference

Abstract: We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order $O(ns)$, where $n$ is the sample size, and $s$ the underlying sparsity of the model. This cost can be further reduced by data sub-sampling when stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics are employed. The algorithm is an extension of the asynchronous Gibbs sampler of Johnson et al. (2013), but can be viewed from a statistical perspective as a form of Bayesian iterated sure independent screening (Fan et al. (2009)). We show that in high-dimensional linear regression problems, the Markov chain generated by the proposed algorithm admits an invariant distribution that recovers correctly the main signal with high probability under some statistical assumptions. Furthermore we show that its mixing time is at most linear in the number of regressors. We illustrate the algorithm with several models.