Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / iii / Paper 216 / 1 / a

Put $a=y_4$ and $b=y_2+y_3$. Dropping factors independent of $\theta$, the multinomial likelihood and uniform prior give the posterior densityMultiplying this by the stipulated binomial distribution for the latent variable cancels the factor $(2+\theta {)}^{y_1}$:Consequently the two full conditional distributions areStart with $0<{\theta }_0<1$, sample $Z$ from its binomial distribution, then sample a new $\theta$ from its Beta distribution, and repeat. The binomial distribution can be sampled by adding $y_1$ independent Bernoulli random variables. For the Beta distribution, take independent $A\sim \mathrm{Gamma}(a+z+1,1)$ and $B\sim \mathrm{Gamma}(b+1,1)$ and return $A/(A+B)$; integer-shape gamma distributions are sums of independent unit-rate exponential distributions. Both shapes are positive even when some observed counts vanish.

Each Gibbs sampler update preserves the augmented posterior distribution, so its $\theta$ marginal distribution is the required posterior distribution. The positive full conditional distributions on the interior allow exploration of the entire support. These iterates are generally dependent; they are not the independent exact draws constructed in the later parts.