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The hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is arguably the most efficient sampling method for general probability distributions of continuous variables. Together with exact Fourier acceleration (EFA) the HMC becomes equivalent to direct…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2025-07-23 Johann Ostmeyer

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo has proven a remarkable empirical success, but only recently have we begun to develop a rigorous understanding of why it performs so well on difficult problems and how it is best applied in practice. Unfortunately,…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-17 Michael Betancourt

For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-19 Cheng Zhang , Babak Shahbaba , Hongkai Zhao

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has become routinely used for sampling from posterior distributions. Its extension Riemann manifold HMC (RMHMC) modifies the proposal kernel through distortion of local distances by a Riemannian metric. The…

Computation · Statistics 2017-02-21 Akihiko Nishimura , David Dunson

One of the open challenges in quantum computing is to find meaningful and practical methods to leverage quantum computation to accelerate classical machine learning workflows. A ubiquitous problem in machine learning workflows is sampling…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-08-08 Owen Lockwood , Peter Weiss , Filip Aronshtein , Guillaume Verdon

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. A leapfrog integrator is commonly used to implement HMC in practice, but its performance can be…

Computation · Statistics 2021-10-28 Marcel Hirt , Michalis K. Titsias , Petros Dellaportas

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful and accurate method to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, HMC techniques are computationally demanding for Bayesian neural networks due to the high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-11 Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan , Tamer A. Zaki , Michael D. Shields

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been widely adopted in the statistics community because of its ability to sample high-dimensional distributions much more efficiently than other Metropolis-based methods. Despite this, HMC often performs…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-19 Arya A. Pourzanjani , Linda R. Petzold

We propose a hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) technique applicable to high-dimensional multivariate normal distributions that effectively samples along chaotic trajectories. The method is predicated on the freedom of choice of the HMC momentum…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2016-04-26 Nirag Kadakia

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method that allows to sample high dimensional probability measures. It relies on the integration of the Hamiltonian dynamics to propose a move which is then accepted or rejected…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-08-08 Tony Lelièvre , Régis Santet , Gabriel Stoltz

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods have revolutionised mathematical computation and enabled statistical inference within many previously intractable models. In this context, Hamiltonian dynamics have been proposed as an efficient way of…

Computation · Statistics 2017-05-09 Alessandro Barp , Francois-Xavier Briol , Anthony D. Kennedy , Mark Girolami

We introduce a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) methodology based on a randomized selection of integration times, referred to as eHMC, where "e" stands for empirical. The approach relies on an offline calibration phase that leverages…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-25 Changye Wu , Pierre Pudlo , Christian P. Robert , Julien Stoehr

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a widely used algorithm for sampling from posterior distributions of complex Bayesian models. It can efficiently explore high-dimensional parameter spaces guided by simulated Hamiltonian flows. However, the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-29 Lingge Li , Andrew Holbrook , Babak Shahbaba , Pierre Baldi

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method allows sampling from continuous densities. Favorable scaling with dimension has led to wide adoption of HMC by the statistics community. Modern auto-differentiating software should allow more…

Computation · Statistics 2022-08-17 Ian Langmore , Michael Dikovsky , Scott Geraedts , Peter Norgaard , Rob von Behren

Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-19 Cheng Zhang , Babak Shahbaba , Hongkai Zhao

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Christopher Wolf , Maximilian Karl , Patrick van der Smagt

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and its dynamic extensions, such as the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional probability distributions. Riemannian manifold…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-16 Miika Kailas , Matti Vihola , Jonas Wallin

Estimating predictive uncertainty is crucial for many computer vision tasks, from image classification to autonomous driving systems. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an sampling method for performing Bayesian inference. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Diego Vergara , Sergio Hernández , Matias Valdenegro-Toro , Felipe Jorquera

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

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo has emerged as a standard tool for posterior computation. In this article, we present an extension that can efficiently explore target distributions with discontinuous densities. Our extension in particular enables…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-09 Akihiko Nishimura , David Dunson , Jianfeng Lu