Parallel interacting Markov adaptive importance sampling

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for statistical inference in signal processing applications. A well-known class of MC methods is importance sampling (IS) and its adaptive extensions. In this work, we introduce an iterated importance sampler using a population of proposal densities, which are adapted according to an MCMC technique over the population of location parameters. The novel algorithm provides a global estimation of the variables of interest iteratively, using all the samples weighted according to the deterministic mixture scheme. Numerical results, on a multi-modal example and a localization problem in wireless sensor networks, show the advantages of the proposed schemes.