EconBase
← All papers

Exact Rejection Sampling for Non-Gaussian State Space Models

Joshua C. C. Chan

arXiv 21 Aug 2026 · Econometrics

arXiv:2608.21619 · PDF · Extracted main text

Abstract

Rejection sampling requires a proposal that dominates the target by a known constant, generally unavailable for non-Gaussian state space models. We construct such a proposal for the latent state path, yielding independent exact smoothing draws and an unbiased likelihood estimator whose relative variance is at most $1/p-1$ per draw at acceptance probability $p$. The method covers scalar states with affine Gaussian dynamics and log-concave observation densities, including multivariate observations. Transition twisting makes the log target-to-proposal ratio separable, and tangent-line twists make each term nonpositive, producing an attained, sharp dominating constant. With a companding node placement, the accumulated envelope error is $O(T/G^2)$ for a sample of length $T$ with $G$ nodes per date, so $G\propto\sqrt{T}$ keeps acceptance bounded away from zero; for stochastic volatility, the required conditions hold almost surely. A simpler mode-centered grid shows the same scaling empirically. At $T=2{,}000$, acceptance is $75%$, versus roughly $10^{-16}$ for the Gaussian envelope.

Citation extraction

44
references
65
in-text mentions
44
distinct cited
3
self-citations
12,751
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 59% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Gilks and Wild (1992) Adaptive Rejection Sampling for Gibbs Sampling0.92844100%
2Richard and Zhang (2007) Efficient High-Dimensional Importance Sampling0.92843100%
3Bauwens and Veredas (2004) The Stochastic Conditional Duration Model: A Latent Variable Model for the Analysis of Financial Durations0.84333100%
4McCausland (2012) The HESSIAN Method: Highly Efficient Simulation Smoothing, in a Nutshell0.73732100%
5Chan and Jeliazkov (2009) Efficient Simulation and Integrated Likelihood Estimation in State Space Models self0.64422100%
6Devroye (1986) Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation0.64422100%
7Durbin and Koopman (1997) Monte Carlo Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Non-Gaussian State Space Models0.64422100%
8Farmer (2021) The Discretization Filter: A Simple Way to Estimate Nonlinear State Space Models0.64422100%
9Kim, Shephard, and Chib (1998) Stochastic Volatility: Likelihood Inference and Comparison with ARCH Models0.64422100%
10Koopman, Shephard, and Creal (2009) Testing the Assumptions Behind Importance Sampling0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 44 scored citations.