Practical Bayesian System Identification using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

This paper considers Bayesian parameter estimation of dynamic systems using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. The Metroplis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is employed, and the main contribution of the paper is to examine and illustrate the efficacy of a particular proposal density based on energy preserving Hamiltonian dynamics, which results in what is known in the statistics literature as ``Hamiltonian Monte--Carlo'' (HMC). The very significant utility of this approach is that, as will be illustrated, it greatly reduces (almost to the point of elimination) the typically very high correlation in the Metropolis--Hastings chain which has been observed by several authors to restrict the application of the MH approach to only very low dimension model structures. The paper illustrates how the HMC approach may be applied to both significant dimension linear and nonlinear model structures, even when the system order is unknown, and using both simulated and real data.