Abstract

When the Gibbs sampler is used to estimate posterior distributions (Gelfand and Smith, 1990), the question of how many iterations are required is central to its implementation. When interest focuses on quantiles of functionals of the posterior distribution, we describe an easily-implemented method for determining the total number of iterations required, and also the number of initial iterations that should be discarded to allow for "burn-in". The method uses only the Gibbs iterates themselves, and does not, for example, require external specification of characteristics of the posterior density. Here the method is described for the situation where one long run is generated, but it can also be easily applied if there are several runs from different starting points. It also applies more generally to Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes other than the Gibbs sampler. It can also be used when several quantiles are to be estimated, when the quantities of interest are probabilities rath...

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