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Related papers: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for (Physics) Dummies

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The goal of this article is to introduce the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method -- a Hamiltonian dynamics-inspired algorithm for sampling from a Gibbs density $\pi(x) \propto e^{-f(x)}$. We focus on the "idealized" case, where one can…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-30 Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful algorithm to sample latent variables from Bayesian models. The advent of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) frees users from writing inference algorithms and lets users focus on modeling.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Jinlin Lai , Javier Burroni , Hui Guan , Daniel Sheldon

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient and effective means of sampling posterior distributions on Euclidean space, which has been extended to manifolds with boundary. However, some applications require an extension to more general…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2017-06-26 Vu Dinh , Arman Bilge , Cheng Zhang , Frederick A. Matsen

In Bayesian inference, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm known for its efficiency in sampling from complex probability distributions. However, its application to models with latent…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alaa Amri , Víctor Elvira , Amy L. Wilson

The main purpose of this paper is to facilitate the communication between the Analytic, Probabilistic and Algorithmic communities. We present a proof of convergence of the Hamiltonian (Hybrid) Monte Carlo algorithm from the point of view of…

Computation · Statistics 2021-02-05 Soumyadip Ghosh , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki

Latent variable models are increasingly used in economics for high-dimensional categorical data like text and surveys. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with parallelized automatic differentiation for…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-03-04 Szymon Sacher , Laura Battaglia , Stephen Hansen

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is widely used for sampling from high dimensional target distributions with densities known up to proportionality. While HMC exhibits favorable scaling properties in high dimensions, it struggles with strongly…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-30 Joonha Park

Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods suffer from low acceptance rate, slow mixing and low efficiency in high dimensions. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo resolves this issue by avoiding the random walk. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Amir Hajian

This paper studies a non-random-walk Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, namely the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method in the context of Subset Simulation used for structural reliability analysis. The HMC method relies on a deterministic…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-20 Ziqi Wang , Marco Broccardo , Junho Song

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an invaluable means of inference with complicated models, and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, in particular Riemannian Manifold Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RMHMC), has demonstrated impressive success in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-02 M. J. Betancourt

Existing rigorous convergence guarantees for the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm use Gaussian auxiliary momentum variables, which are crucially symmetrically distributed. We present a novel convergence analysis for HMC utilizing new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Soumyadip Ghosh , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki

Hamiltonian Flow Monte Carlo(HFMC) methods have been implemented in engineering, biology and chemistry. HFMC makes large gradient based steps to rapidly explore the state space. The application of the Hamiltonian dynamics allows to estimate…

Computation · Statistics 2017-09-06 Raphael Douady , Shohruh Miryusupov

Efficient sampling from high-dimensional distributions is a challenging issue which is encountered in many large data recovery problems involving Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes. In this context, sampling using Hamiltonian dynamics is one…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-02 Lotfi Chaari , Jean-Yves Tourneret , Caroline Chaux , Hadj Batatia

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient proposals for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this paper, we present a generalization of HMC which exploits \textit{non-canonical} Hamiltonian dynamics.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-22 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Mark Rowland , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard Turner

Hierarchical Bayesian models based on Gaussian processes are considered useful for describing complex nonlinear statistical dependencies among variables in real-world data. However, effective Monte Carlo algorithms for inference with these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Takashi Hayakawa , Satoshi Asai

In recent years, the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm has been found to work more efficiently compared to other popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods (such as random walk Metropolis-Hastings) in generating samples from a…

Computation · Statistics 2014-02-18 Andrew L. Beam , Sujit K. Ghosh , Jon Doyle

Bayesian reasoning in linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) is challenging and often requires advanced sampling techniques like Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). A common approach is to write the model in a probabilistic programming language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Jinlin Lai , Justin Domke , Daniel Sheldon

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

Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-19 Wenbo Hu , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

Decision trees have found widespread application within the machine learning community due to their flexibility and interpretability. This paper is directed towards learning decision trees from data using a Bayesian approach, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Jodie A. Cochrane , Adrian G. Wills , Sarah J. Johnson