Related papers: Almanac: HMC sampling with bounded velocity
With the recently increased interest in probabilistic models, the efficiency of an underlying sampler becomes a crucial consideration. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is one popular option for models of this kind. Performance of the method,…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
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…
We introduce Preconditioned Monte Carlo (PMC), a novel Monte Carlo method for Bayesian inference that facilitates efficient sampling of probability distributions with non-trivial geometry. PMC utilises a Normalising Flow (NF) in order to…
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…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is the mainstay of applied Bayesian inference for differentiable models. However, HMC still struggles to sample from hierarchical models that induce densities with multiscale geometry: a large step size is…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
We investigate the properties of the Hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm (HMC) in high dimensions. HMC develops a Markov chain reversible w.r.t. a given target distribution $\Pi$ by using separable Hamiltonian dynamics with potential $-\log\Pi$.…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods struggle to explore distributions that are concentrated in the neighbourhood of low-dimensional structures. These pathologies naturally occur in a number of situations. For example, they are common…
Constraints can be interpreted in a broad sense as any kind of explicit restriction over the parameters. While some constraints are defined directly on the parameter space, when they are instead defined by known behaviour on the model,…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a premier Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for continuous target distributions. Its full potential can only be unleashed when its problem-dependent hyperparameters are tuned well. The adaptation of…
In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…
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…
In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is…
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…
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…
We show how the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm can sometimes be speeded up by "splitting" the Hamiltonian in a way that allows much of the movement around the state space to be done at low computational cost. One context where this is…
Given a target distribution $\mu \propto e^{-\mathcal{H}}$ to sample from with Hamiltonian $\mathcal{H}$, in this paper we propose and analyze new Metropolis-Hastings sampling algorithms that target an alternative distribution…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have recently shown successful results for conditional sampling of generative diffusion models. In this paper we propose a new diffusion posterior SMC sampler achieving improved statistical efficiencies,…