inference in Kingman’s coalescent with pMCMC

As I was checking the recent stat postings on arXiv, I noticed the paper by Chen and Xie entitled inference in Kingman’s coalescent with pMCMC.  (And surprisingly deposited in the machine learning subdomain.) The authors compare a pMCMC implementation for Kingman’s coalescent with importance sampling (à la Stephens & Donnelly), regular MCMC and SMC.  The specifics of their pMCMC algorithm is that they simulate the coalescent times conditional on the tree structure and the tree structure conditional on the coalescent times (via SMC). The results reported in the paper consider up to five loci and agree with earlier experiments showing poor performances of MCMC algorithms (based on the LAMARC software and apparently using independent proposals).  They show similar performances between importance sampling and pMCMC. While I find this application of pMCMC interesting, I wonder at the generality of the approach: when I was introduced to ABC techniques, the motivation was that importance sampling was deteriorating very quickly with the number of parameters. Here it seems the authors only considered one parameter θ. I wonder what happens when the number of parameters increases. And how pMCMC would then compare with ABC.