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Estimation of small failure probabilities is one of the most important and challenging problems in reliability engineering. In cases of practical interest, the failure probability is given by a high-dimensional integral. Since multivariate integration suffers from the curse of dimensionality, the usual numerical methods are inapplicable. Over the past decade, the civil engineering research comm...

This article considers Monte Carlo integration under rejection sampling or Metropolis-Hastings sampling. Each algorithm involves accepting or rejecting observations from proposal distributions other than a target distribution. While taking a likelihood approach, we basically treat the sampling scheme as a random design, and define a stratified estimator of the baseline measure. We establish tha...

We consider Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms which combine Gibbs updates with Metropolis-Hastings updates, resulting in a conditional Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We develop conditions under which this sampler will be geometrically or uniformly ergodic. We apply our results to an algorithm for drawing Bayesian inferences about the entire sample path of a diffusion process, based only upon di...

This work presents a version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm using quasi-Monte Carlo inputs. We prove that the method yields consistent estimates in some problems with finite state spaces and completely uniformly distributed inputs. In some numerical examples, the proposed method is much more accurate than ordinary Metropolis-Hastings sampling.

This study compared several parameter estimation methods for multi-unidimensional graded response models using their corresponding statistical software programs and packages. Specifically, we compared two marginal maximum likelihood (MML) approaches (Bock-Aitkin expectation-maximum algorithm, adaptive quadrature approach), four fully Bayesian algorithms (Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-Hastings, Has...

We investigate the hypothesis that the macroscopic properties of a porous material can be determined from limited morphological information. Specifically, we investigate this hypothesis for the Minkowski functionals of two-phase media in 2-D. We look at two methods for generating samples with desired Minkowski functionals: the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The Metropolis-...

The development of an efficient MCMC strategy for sampling from complex distributions is a difficult task that needs to be solved for calculating small failure probabilities encountered in high-dimensional reliability analysis of engineering systems. Usually different variations of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm (MH) are used. However, the standard MH algorithm does generally not work in hig...

In this paper, we show how to use Bayesian approach in the multiplicative heteroscedasticity model proposed by Harvey (1976), where the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm are applied. Some candidate-generating densities are considered in our Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. We carry out Monte Carlo study to examine the properties of the estimates via Bayesian approach and it...

Prefetching is a simple and general method for single-chain parallelisation of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm based on the idea of evaluating the posterior in parallel and ahead of time. Improved Metropolis-Hastings prefetching algorithms are presented and evaluated. It is shown how to use available information to make better predictions of the future states of the chain and increase the e¢ ...