Let π denote the intractable posterior density that results when the standard default prior is placed on the parameters in a linear regression model with iid Laplace errors. We analyze the Markov chains underlying two different Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for exploring π. In...

The sandwich algorithm (SA) is an alternative to the data augmentation (DA) algorithm that uses an extra simulation step at each iteration. In this paper, we show that the sandwich algorithm always converges at least as fast as the DA algorithm, in the Markov operator norm sense. We also...