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Questions tagged [hamiltonian-monte-carlo]

Tag for questions related to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.

43 questions
25
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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo vs. Sequential Monte Carlo

I am trying to get a feel for the relative merits and drawbacks, as well as different application domains of these two MCMC schemes. When would you use which and why? When might one fail but the other not (e.g. where is HMC applicable but SMC…
Astrid
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Hamiltonian monte carlo

Can someone explain the main idea behind Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods and in which cases they will yield better results than Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods ?
user83346
13
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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for dummies

Could you provide a step-by-step for dummies explanation of how Hamiltonian Monte Carlo work? PS: I've already read the answers here, Hamiltonian monte carlo, and here, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo vs. Sequential Monte Carlo, and here, Hamiltonian Monte…
user188529
13
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2 answers

For Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, why does negating the momentum variables result in a symmetric proposal?

I have been going through Radford Neal's excellent HMC book chapter in detail. However, there is one detail that I'm really obsessing with now, and I'm not sure if I'm thinking about it right. When describing the Metropolis step for HMC, which is…
ComputerScientist
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12
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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: how to make sense of the Metropolis-Hasting proposal?

I am trying to understand the inner working of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), but can't fully understand the part when we replace the deterministic time-integration with a Metropolis-Hasting proposal. I am reading the awesome introductory paper A…
cwl
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11
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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC): what's the intuition and justification behind a Gaussian-distributed momentum variable?

I am reading an awesome introductory HMC paper by Prof. Michael Betancourt, but getting stuck in understanding how do we go about the choice of the distribution of the momentum. Summary The basic idea of HMC is to introduce a momentum variable $p$…
cwl
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10
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How does Hamiltonian Monte Carlo work?

I made the below graphic to explain how I currently understand the HMC algorithm. I'd like verification from a subject matter expert if this understanding is or isn't correct. The text in the below slide is copied below for ease of…
mjake
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No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC): how do I understand the doubling process?

I'm reading the original NUTS paper by Hoffman and Gelman, but couldn't fully understand the recursively doubling process. The following figure is taken from the paper. The NUTS process starts with an initial state $(\theta, r)$ represented by the…
cwl
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Understanding the Typical Set for Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling

I started reading "A Conceptual Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo" today, and I've gotten stuck on understanding Betancourt's explanation of what a "typical set" is. If $q_1, q_2, \ldots, q_n$ are generated from, say, a Metropolis-Hastings…
Taylor
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MCMC sampling for a model with a multinomial choice--so the parameters need to sum to 1

this is a head-scratcher for me, but a very interesting problem. So I have a stochastic simulation model for a hiring process. Basically different groups get hired into a company with different probabilities. So there is a multinomial process for…
krishnab
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What is the purpose of "transformed variables" in Stan?

I find references to transformed values in the Stan Reference and User Guides, and example code but no clear tutorial explanation. I'd be grateful for a link. Michael Betancourt, in his Stan Modeling Language lecture, says this: "The transformed…
John Strong
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Reconciling Langevin MC methods as one-step HMC versus as diffusion or brownian motion

I have a basic understanding of Hamiltonian monte carlo and why it works. I've read that Langevin MC is basically a special case of HMC when you only step the dynamics forward a single timestep before resampling the momentum -- and I see how this…
shimao
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7
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Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo with piecewise differentiable log likelihood

This is a bit of a curious situation. I have an energy function $E=S+N$ which is the sum of a smooth differentiable function $S$ and a piecewise constant "noise" function $N$. This means that on average the gradient does point in the right…
Arthur B.
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Is there an HMC algorithm that estimates a model with noncontinuous parameters?

Is there an HMC algorithm that estimates a model with noncontinuous parameters? All of the intuition I have for how HMC surfs around in the phase space is based on examples for posterior distributions with continuous parameters, but I wanted to know…
Taylor
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Proposal distribution in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

I have been reading A Conceptual Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo by Betancourt (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02434), which is a great introduction to HMC, but there is one part that I can't get my head around and that's what the proposal…
J.C.Wahl
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