Colloque International De Statistique Appliquée Pour Le Développement En Afrique International Conference on Applied Statistics for Development in Africa Bayesian Numerical Inference for Hidden Markov Models

In many situations it is important to be able to propose N independent realizations of a given distribution law. We propose a strategy for making N parallel Monte Carlo Markov Chains (MCMC) interact in order to get an approximation of an independent N -sample of a given target law. In this method each individual chain proposes candidates for all other chains. We prove that the set of interacting chains is itself a MCMC method for the product of N target measures. Compared to independent parallel chains this method is more time consuming, but we show through examples that it possesses many advantages. This approach is applied to a biomass evolution model.