A novel rejection sampling scheme for posterior probability distributions

Rejection sampling (RS) is a well-known method to draw from arbitrary target probability distributions, which has important applications by itself or as a building block for more sophisticated Monte Carlo techniques. The main limitation to the use of RS is the need to find an adequate upper bound for the ratio of the target probability density function (pdf) over the proposal pdf from which the samples are generated. There are no general methods to analytically find this bound, except in the particular case in which the target pdf is log-concave. In this paper we adopt a Bayesian view of the problem and propose a general RS scheme to draw from the posterior pdf of a signal of interest using its prior density as a proposal function. The method enables the analytical calculation of the bound and can be applied to a large class of target densities. We illustrate its use with a simple numerical example.