Roll-back Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Abstract: We propose a new framework for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) on truncated probability distributions with smooth underlying density functions. Traditional HMC requires computing the gradient of potential function associated with the target distribution, and therefore does not perform its full power on truncated distributions due to lack of continuity and differentiability. In our framework, we introduce a sharp sigmoid factor in the density function to approximate the probability drop at the truncation boundary. The target potential function is approximated by a new potential which smoothly extends to the entire sample space. HMC is then performed on the approximate potential. While our method is easy to implement and applies to a wide range of problems, it also achieves comparable computational efficiency on various sampling tasks compared to other baseline methods. RBHMC also gives rise to a new approach for Bayesian inference on constrained spaces.