Particle filter methods are complex inference procedures, which combine importance sampling and Monte Carlo schemes in order to explore consistently a sequence of multiple distributions of interest. We show that such methods can also offer an efficient estimation tool in 'static' set-ups, in...

Nested sampling is a simulation method for approximating marginal likelihoods. We establish that nested sampling has an approximation error that vanishes at the standard Monte Carlo rate and that this error is asymptotically Gaussian. It is shown that the asymptotic variance of the nested...