convergence of MCMC

Michael Betancourt just posted on arXiv an historical  review piece on the convergence of MCMC, with a physical perspective.

“The success of these of Markov chain Monte Carlo, however, contributed to its own demise.”

The discourse proceeds through augmented [reality!] versions of MCMC algorithms taking advantage of the shape and nature of the target distribution, like Langevin diffusions [which cannot be simulated directly and exactly at the same time] in statistics and molecular dynamics in physics. (Which reminded me of the two parallel threads at the ICMS workshop we had a few years ago.) Merging into hybrid Monte Carlo, morphing into Hamiltonian Monte Carlo under the quills of Radford Neal and David MacKay in the 1990’s. It is a short entry (and so is this post), with some background already well-known to the community, but it nonetheless provides a perspective and references rarely mentioned in statistics.