The Rasch Sampler

Abstract

The Rasch sampler is an efficient algorithm to sample binary matrices with given marginal sums. It is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. The program can handle matrices of up to 1024 rows and 64 columns. A special option allows to sample square matrices with given marginals and fixed main diagonal, a problem prominent in social network analysis. In all cases the stationary distribution is uniform. The user has control on the serial dependency.

Keywords

• Markov chain Monte Carlo
• binary matrices
• fixed marginals
• nonparametric tests
• Rasch model