Estimation in Non-Linear Non-Gaussian State Space Models with Precision-Based Methods

In recent years state space models, particularly the linear Gaussian version, have become the standard framework for analyzing macro-economic and financial data. However, many theoretically motivated models imply non-linear or non-Gaussian specifications – or both. Existing methods for estimating such models are computationally intensive, and often cannot be applied to models with more than a few states. Building upon recent developments in precision-based algorithms, we propose a general approach to estimating high-dimensional non-linear non-Gaussian state space models. The baseline algorithm approximates the conditional distribution of the states by a multivariate Gaussian or t density, which is then used for posterior simulation. We further develop this baseline algorithm to construct more sophisticated samplers with attractive properties: on based on the accept—reject Metropolis-Hastings (ARHM) algorithm, and another adaptive collapsed sampler inspired by the cross-entropy method. To illustrate the proposed approach, we investigate the effect of the zero lower bound of interest rate on monetary transmission mechanism.