Bayesian methods
No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)
The No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) is a self-tuning Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm introduced by Hoffman and Gelman (2014) that extends Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) by automatically determining the optimal number of leapfrog steps, eliminating the most sensitive manual tuning parameter. NUTS is the default sampler in Stan and PyMC and has made large-scale, high-dimensional Bayesian inference practically accessible without requiring users to set trajectory lengths by hand.
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Sources
- Hoffman, M. D., & Gelman, A. (2014). The No-U-Turn Sampler: Adaptively setting path lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 15(47), 1593–1623. DOI: 10.5555/2627435.2627515 ↗
- Neal, R. M. (2011). MCMC using Hamiltonian dynamics. In S. Brooks, A. Gelman, G. L. Jones, & X.-L. Meng (Eds.), Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (pp. 113–162). CRC Press. DOI: 10.1201/b10905-6 ↗
- Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S., Dunson, D. B., Vehtari, A., & Rubin, D. B. (2013). Bayesian Data Analysis (3rd ed.). CRC Press. ISBN: 978-1-4398-4095-5