robustified Hamiltonian

In Gregynog, last week, Lionel Riou-Durant (Warwick) presented his recent work with Jure Vogrinc on Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Trajectories, which I had also heard in the Séminaire Parisien de Statistique two weeks ago. Starting with a nice exposition of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, highlighting its drawbacks. This includes the potentially damaging impact of poorly tuning the integration time. Their proposal is to act upon the velocity in the Hamiltonian through Langevin (positive) damping, which also preserves the stationarity.  (And connects with randomised HMC.) One theoretical in the paper is that the Langevin diffusion achieves the fastest mixing rate among randomised HMCs. From a practical perspective, there exists a version of the leapfrog integrator that adapts to this setting and can be implemented as a Metropolis adjustment. (Hence the MALT connection.) An interesting feature is that the process as such is ergodic, which avoids renewal steps (and U-turns). (There are still calibration parameters to adjust, obviously.)