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	Hamiltonian Monte Carlo	Inferenza Variazionale
Campo	Bayesiano	Bayesiano
Famiglia	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods
Anno di origine	1987	1999
Ideatore	—	Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola & Saul
Tipo	Gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler	Approximate Bayesian inference
Fonte seminale	Duane, S., Kennedy, A. D., Pendleton, B. J., & Roweth, D. (1987). Hybrid Monte Carlo. Physics Letters B, 195(2), 216–222.	Jordan, M. I., Ghahramani, Z., Jaakkola, T. S., & Saul, L. K. (1999). An introduction to variational methods for graphical models. Machine Learning, 37(2), 183–233.
Alias	HMC, Hybrid Monte Carlo, NUTS, No-U-Turn Sampler	VI, variational Bayes, VB, mean-field variational inference
Correlati	3	4
Sintesi	Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that uses the geometry of the log-posterior surface to make large, informed jumps through parameter space instead of the small random steps of classical MCMC. Originally introduced for lattice field theory by Duane, Kennedy, Pendleton, and Roweth (1987) under the name Hybrid Monte Carlo, and brought into mainstream statistics by Radford Neal's authoritative 2011 chapter, HMC is today the default sampler in Stan and PyMC and is widely regarded as the state-of-the-art engine for Bayesian posterior inference in high-dimensional models.	Variational inference (VI) is a family of techniques that turn Bayesian posterior computation into an optimisation problem. Instead of drawing samples from the exact posterior — as Markov chain Monte Carlo does — VI posits a simpler, tractable family of distributions and finds the member of that family closest to the true posterior by maximising the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Introduced in its modern graphical-model form by Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola and Saul (1999) and given a comprehensive statistical treatment by Blei, Kucukelbir and McAuliffe (2017), VI is now the standard scalable inference engine in probabilistic machine learning.