The G-Wishart Weighted Proposal Algorithm: Efficient Posterior Computation for Gaussian Graphical Models

Abstract

Gaussian graphical models can capture complex dependency structures among variables. For such models, Bayesian inference is attractive as it provides principled ways to incorporate prior information and to quantify uncertainty through the posterior distribution. However, posterior computation under the conjugate G-Wishart prior distribution on the precision matrix is expensive for general nondecomposable graphs. We therefore propose a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method named the G-Wishart weighted proposal algorithm (WWA). WWA’s distinctive features include delayed acceptance MCMC, Gibbs updates for the precision matrix and an informed proposal distribution on the graph space that enables embarrassingly parallel computations. Compared to existing approaches, WWA reduces the frequency of the relatively expensive sampling from the G-Wishart distribution. This results in faster MCMC convergence, improved MCMC mixing and reduced computing time. Numerical studies on simulated and real data show that WWA provides a more efficient tool for posterior inference than competing state-of-the-art MCMC algorithms. Supplemental materials for the article are available online.