Asymptotic bias of inexact Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods in high dimension

Alain Durmus, Andreas Eberle

Published 2021-08-02Version 1

This paper establishes non-asymptotic bounds on Wasserstein distances between the invariant probability measures of inexact MCMC methods and their target distribution. In particular, the results apply to the unadjusted Langevin algorithm and to unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, but also to methods relying on other discretization schemes. Our focus is on understanding the precise dependence of the accuracy on both the dimension and the discretization step size. We show that the dimension dependence relies on some key quantities. As a consequence, the same dependence on the step size and the dimension as in the product case can be recovered for several important classes of models. On the other hand, for more general models, the dimension dependence of the asymptotic bias may be worse than in the product case even if the exact dynamics has dimension-free mixing properties.