Re:An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming
by BenoitEssiambre on Friday October 22, 2021 @10:28PM
(#28965138)
I am not an expert in this but I find the math behind HMC to be out of this world as described in this mindblowing twitter thread:
You can easily do this calculation by hand or in Python, but this does not generalize to more complex real-world scenarios. For complex probabilistic models, we must rely on numerical approximations. MCMC is just one algorithm for doing this approximate inference. Another popular technique is called variational inference [2]. Another commenter mentioned HMC [3], which is just a specific instance of MCMC.
[1] https://mc-stan.org/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00670
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1901