Switching Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for sampling from mixture distributions

Abstract

We introduce a switching Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method for sampling from finite mixture Boltzmann-Gibbs distributions. We propose symmetric numerical integrators to approximate switching Hamiltonian dynamics interlaced with Poisson jumps, where the regime-switching chain is simulated using the uniformization technique or the stochastic simulation algorithm. We prove geometric ergodicity of the resulting Markov chain. We develop an approach based on the discrete Poisson equation associated with numerical schemes to estimate the error in computing ergodic averages. Using this approach we prove that the proposed numerical integrators have second-order bias. This approach is simple and can be generalized to other settings, for example, kinetic Langevin equations. Finally, we verify the convergence result via numerical experiment.