Fast MCMC sampling for Markov jump processes and continuous time Bayesian networks

Markov jump processes (or continuous-time Markov chains) are a simple and important class of continuous-time dynamical systems. In this paper, we tackle the problem of simulating from the posterior distribution over paths in these models, given partial and noisy observations. Our ap-proach is an auxiliary variable Gibbs sampler, and is based on the idea of uniformization. This sets up a Markov chain over paths by alternately sampling a finite set of virtual jump times given the current path, and then sampling a new path given the set of extant and virtual jump times. The first step involves simulating a piecewise-constant inhomogeneous Poisson process, while for the second, we use a standard hidden Markov model forward filtering-backward sampling algorithm. Our method is exact and does not involve approximations like time-discretization. We demonstrate how our sampler extends naturally to MJP-based models like Markov-modulated Poisson processes and continuous-time Bayesian networks, and show significant computational benefits over state-of-the-art MCMC samplers for these models