Is Gibbs sampling faster than Hamiltonian Monte Carlo on GLMs?

Son Luu, Zuheng Xu, Nikola Surjanovic, Miguel Biron-Lattes, Trevor Campbell, Alexandre Bouchard-Cote

TL;DR: A comparison between HMC and Gibbs showing that neither one dominates the other for GLM.

Abstract: The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is often lauded for its ability to effectively sample from high-dimensional distributions. In this paper we challenge the presumed domination of HMC for the Bayesian analysis of GLMs. By utilizing the structure of the compute graph rather than the graphical model, we reduce the time per sweep of a full-scan Gibbs sampler from $O(d^2)$ to $O(d)$, where $d$ is the number of GLM parameters. Our simple changes to the implementation of the Gibbs sampler allow us to perform Bayesian inference on high-dimensional GLMs that are practically infeasible with traditional Gibbs sampler implementations. We empirically demonstrate substantial increase in effective sample size per time when comparing our Gibbs algorithms to state-of-the-art HMC algorithms. While Gibbs is superior in terms of dimension scaling, neither Gibbs nor HMC dominate the other: we provide numerical and theoretical evidence that HMC retains an edge in certain circumstances thanks to its advantageous condition number scaling. Interestingly, for GLMs of fixed data size, we observe that increasing dimensionality can stabilize or even decrease condition number, shedding light on the empirical advantage of our efficient Gibbs sampler.

Submission Number: 987