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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC…

Computation · Statistics 2019-05-03 Khue-Dung Dang , Matias Quiroz , Robert Kohn , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Mattias Villani

We unify slice sampling and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling, demonstrating their connection via the Hamiltonian-Jacobi equation from Hamiltonian mechanics. This insight enables extension of HMC and slice sampling to a broader family…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-12 Yizhe Zhang , Xiangyu Wang , Changyou Chen , Ricardo Henao , Kai Fan , Lawrence Carin

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-12 Matthew M. Graham , Amos J. Storkey

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

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

It was recently shown that path integral Monte Carlo can be used to directly compute partition functions of Hamiltonians with vibronic coupling [J. Chem. Phys. 148, 194110 (2018)]. While the importance sampling Monte Carlo integration…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2019-12-30 Dmitri Iouchtchenko , Neil Raymond , Pierre-Nicholas Roy , Marcel Nooijen

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 (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-15 Xiaoyu Lu , Valerio Perrone , Leonard Hasenclever , Yee Whye Teh , Sebastian J. Vollmer

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

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

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has been recognized as a powerful sampling tool in computational statistics. We show that performance of HMC can be significantly improved by incorporating importance sampling and an irreversible…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-26 Tijana Radivojević , Elena Akhmatskaya

Tuning the durations of the Hamiltonian flow in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (also called Hybrid Monte Carlo) (HMC) involves a tradeoff between computational cost and sampling quality, which is typically challenging to resolve in a satisfactory…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-09-08 Nawaf Bou-Rabee , Jesus Maria Sanz-Serna

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) 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

Traditional gradient-based sampling methods, like standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, require that the desired target distribution is continuous and differentiable. This limits the types of models one can define, although the presented models…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-28 Jimmy Huy Tran , Tore Selland Kleppe

Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-22 Christian A. Naesseth , Scott W. Linderman , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Building upon Lagrangian mechanics on Wess's $q$-commutative spaces, we derive the $q$-deformed Hamiltonian dynamics as formulated by Lavagno et al. (2006). We then develop a computationally tractable scheme and propose a novel Hamiltonian…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Xiaomei Yang , Zhiliang Deng

Stochastic processes are a flexible and widely used family of models for statistical modeling. While stochastic processes offer attractive properties such as inclusion of uncertainty properties, their inference is typically intractable,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 Teemu Härkönen , Simo Särkkä

Due to its constrained support, the Dirichlet distribution is uniquely suited to many applications. The constraints that make it powerful, however, can also hinder practical implementations, particularly those utilizing Markov Chain Monte…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-03-02 M. J. Betancourt

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-05-13 Tianqi Chen , Emily B. Fox , Carlos Guestrin