Truncated Log-concave Sampling for Convex Bodies with Reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Apostolos Chalkis, Vissarion Fisikopoulos, Marios Papachristou, Elias P. Tsigaridas

Abstract: We introduce Reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (ReHMC), an HMC-based algorithm to sample from a log-concave distribution restricted to a convex body. The random walk is based on incorporating reflections to the Hamiltonian dynamics such that the support of the target density is the convex body. We develop an efficient open source implementation of ReHMC and perform an experimental study on various high-dimensional datasets. The experiments suggest that ReHMC outperforms Hit-and-Run and Coordinate-Hit-and-Run regarding the time it needs to produce an independent sample, introducing practical truncated sampling in thousands of dimensions.