kasparmartens / nuts Goto Github PK

Thanks for putting this online, it has been helpful while I have been trying to write my own implementation of NUTS.

I just wanted to draw your attention to a discrepancy between your R code and algorithm 6 in Hoffman & Gelman.

Line 81 of nuts.R has theta <- temp$theta, in other words the accepted proposal is immediately stored in the variable theta. If the loop of lines 66-91 repeats, this means that this new value of theta will be passed to build_tree as argument 7, which is called theta0 inside build_tree.

But in algorithm 6 of Hoffman & Gelman, the equivalent calls to BuildTree are always passed $\theta^{m-1}$ for $\theta^0$, so that within BuildTree, $\theta^0$ will always be equal to the previous iteration's $\theta$ rather than any prospectively accepted proposals for $\theta$.

I'm not sure which is correct, the paper or your implementation. In any case, I think this only affects how the step size is calculated, so it wouldn't lead to incorrect inferences.