Neural network gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.

Lingge Li, Andrew Holbrook, Babak Shahbaba, Pierre Baldi
Author Information
  1. Lingge Li: Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA. ORCID
  2. Andrew Holbrook: Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
  3. Babak Shahbaba: Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA.
  4. Pierre Baldi: Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA.

Abstract

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 algorithm requires repeated gradient calculations, and these computations become increasingly burdensome as data sets scale. We present a method to substantially reduce the computation burden by using a neural network to approximate the gradient. First, we prove that the proposed method still maintains convergence to the true distribution though the approximated gradient no longer comes from a Hamiltonian system. Second, we conduct experiments on synthetic examples and real data to validate the proposed method.

Keywords

References

  1. Neural Netw. 2016 Nov;83:51-74 [PMID: 27584574]
  2. Stat Comput. 2017 Nov;27(6):1473-1490 [PMID: 28983154]

Grants

  1. R01 MH115697/NIMH NIH HHS