Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Abstract

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 random-walk proposals. The popularity of such methods has grown sig-nificantly in recent years. However, a limitation of HMC methods is the required gradient computation for simulation of the Hamiltonian dynamical system—such a computation is infeasible in problems involving a large sample size or streaming data. Instead, we must rely on a noisy gradient estimate computed from a subset of the data. In this paper, we explore the properties of such a stochastic gradient HMC approach. Surprisingly, the natural implementation of the stochastic approx-imation can be arbitrarily bad. To address this problem we introduce a variant that uses second-order Langevin dynamics with a friction term that counteracts the effects of the noisy gradient, maintaining the desired target distribution as the in-variant distribution. Results on simulated data validate our theory. We also provide an application of our methods to a classification task using neural networks and to online Bayesian matrix factorization. 1