MCMC TypesΒΆ

The MCMC types and their relationships are depicted below with a Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagram. In the diagram, types are represented with boxes that display their respective names in the top-most panels, and fields in the second panels. By convention, plus signs denote fields that are publicly accessible, which is always the case for these structures in julia. Hollow triangle arrows point to types that the originator extends. Solid diamond arrows indicate that a number of instances of the type being pointed to are contained in the originator. The undirected line between Sampler and Stochastic represents a bi-directional association. Numbers on the graph indicate that there is one (1), zero or more (0..*), or one or more (1..*) instances of a type at the corresponding end of a relationship.

_images/mcmcUML.png

UML relational diagram of MCMC types and their fields.

The relationships are as follows. Type Model contains a dictionary field (Dict{Symbol, Any}) of model nodes and a field (Vector{Sampler}) of one or more sampling functions. Nodes can be one of three types:

  • Stochastic nodes (ScalarStochastic or ArrayStochastic) are any model terms that have likelihood or prior distributional specifications.
  • Logical nodes (ScalarLogical or ArrayLogical) are terms that are deterministic functions of other nodes.
  • Input nodes (not shown) are any other model terms and data types that are considered to be fixed quantities in the analysis.

Stochastic and Logical are inherited from the Variate types and can be used with operators and in functions defined for that type. The sampling functions in Model each correspond to a block of one or more model parameters (stochastic nodes) to be sampled from a target distribution (e.g. full conditional) during the simulation. Finally, ModelChains stores simulation output for a given model. Detailed information about each type is provided in the subsequent sections.