On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu> wrote:
Thanks to all for the helpful references on MCMC. These should
keep me busy!
There's quite an interesting discussion of the coding of a
Gibbs sampler at
http://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/gibbs-sampler-in-various-languag...
along with timings of various implementations (R, C + GSL,
python, etc.).
I've implemented Darren Wilkinson's test case as a libgretl
program (very fast) and also as a gretl script (much slower
than C, but faster than python and a good deal faster than R).
I'm currently experimenting to see how much of a speed-up
might be available for the hansl version if there were a
suitable dedicated command.
While you're doing timings, you might be interested to check out
Julia, if you haven't. New, fast high-level language that is promising
for these kinds of simulations.
http://timsalimans.com/gibbs-sampling-with-julia/
http://julialang.org/
Skipper