Improving Stochastic Relaxation for Gussian Random Fields

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned with the simulation of Gaussian random fields by means of iterative stochastic algorithms, which are compared in terms of rate of convergence. A parametrized class of algorithms, which includes stochastic relaxation (Gibbs sampler), is proposed and its convergence properties are established. A suitable choice for the parameter improves the rate of convergence with respect to stochastic relaxation for special classes of covariance matrices. Some examples and numerical experiments are given.