A generalized discontinuous Hamilton Monte Carlo for transdimensional sampling

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a discontinuous Hamilton Monte Carlo (DHMC) to sample from dimensional varying distributions, and particularly the grand canonical ensemble. The DHMC was proposed in [Biometrika, 107(2)] for discontinuous potential where the variable has a fixed dimension. When the dimension changes, there is no clear explanation of the volume-preserving property, and the conservation of energy is also not necessary. We use a random sampling for the extra dimensions, which corresponds to a measure transform. We show that when the energy is corrected suitably for the trans-dimensional Hamiltonian dynamics, the detailed balance condition is then satisfied. For the grand canonical ensemble, such a procedure can be explained very naturally to be the extra free energy change brought by the newly added particles, which justifies the rationality of our approach. To sample the grand canonical ensemble for interacting particle systems, the DHMC is then combined with the random batch method to yield an efficient sampling method. In experiments, we show that the proposed DHMC combined with the random batch method generates samples with much less correlation when compared with the traditional Metropolis-Hastings method.