Likewise, the ideas of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and population Monte Carlo (PMC) methods have been adapted to the ABC setting. The general idea is to iteratively approach the posterior from the prior through a sequence of target distributions. An advantage of such methods, compared to ABC-MCMC, is that the samples from the resulting posterior are independent. In addition, with sequential methods the tolerance levels must not be specified prior to the analysis, but are adjusted adaptively.
