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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-09 Julien Stoehr , Alan Benson , Nial Friel

Leveraging the coherent exploration of Hamiltonian flow, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo produces computationally efficient Monte Carlo estimators, even with respect to complex and high-dimensional target distributions. When confronted with…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-06 M. J. Betancourt

Modified Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (MHMC) methods combine the ideas behind two popular sampling approaches: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and importance sampling. As in the HMC case, the bulk of the computational cost of MHMC algorithms lies…

Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…

Computation · Statistics 2020-05-19 Zexi Song , Zhiqiang Tan

We analyze Riemannian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RHMC) for sampling a polytope defined by $m$ inequalities in $\R^n$ endowed with the metric defined by the Hessian of a convex barrier function. The advantage of RHMC over Euclidean methods…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Khashayar Gatmiry , Jonathan Kelner , Santosh S. Vempala

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-10 Guangyao Zhou

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that uses Hamiltonian dynamics to generate samples from a target distribution. To fully exploit its potential, we must understand how…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-27 Abraham Granados , Isaías Bañales

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for drawing samples from smooth probability densities over continuous spaces. We study the variant most widely used in practice, Metropolized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-12 Yuansi Chen , Raaz Dwivedi , Martin J. Wainwright , Bin Yu

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is often lauded for its ability to effectively sample from high-dimensional distributions. In this paper we challenge the presumed domination of HMC for the Bayesian analysis of GLMs. By utilizing…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling from complex high-dimensional continuous distributions. However, in many situations it is necessary or desirable to combine HMC with other…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-24 Guangyao Zhou

We propose a splitting Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SHMC) algorithm, which can be computationally efficient when combined with the random mini-batch strategy. By splitting the potential energy into numerically nonstiff and stiff parts, one…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-06-23 Lei Li , Lin Liu , Yuzhou Peng

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach that exhibits favourable exploration properties in high-dimensional models such as neural networks. Unfortunately, HMC has limited use in large-data regimes and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-15 Adam D. Cobb , Brian Jalaian

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-12 Yizhe Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

We present a comprehensive comparison of different Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, evaluating their performance on both standard test problems and cosmological parameter estimation. Our analysis includes traditional…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-02-28 Denitsa Staicova

We study Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samplers based on splitting the Hamiltonian $H$ as $H_0(\theta,p)+U_1(\theta)$, where $H_0$ is quadratic and $U_1$ small. We show that, in general, such samplers suffer from stepsize stability…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-18 Fernando Casas , Jesús María Sanz-Serna , Luke Shaw

We propose a new framework for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) on truncated probability distributions with smooth underlying density functions. Traditional HMC requires computing the gradient of potential function associated with the target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Kexin Yi , Finale Doshi-Velez

In this paper, we propose Barrier Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (BHMC), a version of the HMC algorithm which aims at sampling from a Gibbs distribution $\pi$ on a manifold $\mathrm{M}$, endowed with a Hessian metric $\mathfrak{g}$ derived from a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Maxence Noble , Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus

The Gaussian process (GP) is a popular way to specify dependencies between random variables in a probabilistic model. In the Bayesian framework the covariance structure can be specified using unknown hyperparameters. Integrating over these…

Computation · Statistics 2010-11-01 Iain Murray , Ryan Prescott Adams

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method generates samples by introducing a mechanical system that explores the target density. For distributions on manifolds it is not always simple to perform the mechanics as a result of the lack of global…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-22 Alessandro Barp , Anthony Kennedy , Mark Girolami

Geodesic slice sampling, introduced in Durmus et al., 2024, is a slice sampling based Markov chain Monte Carlo method for approximate sampling from distributions on Riemannian manifolds. We prove that it is uniformly ergodic for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Mareike Hasenpflug