We develop a new uniform drift condition and local minorization that implies a stronger weighted form of uniform ergodicity for Markov chains we call hyper-V uniform ergodicity. The convergence guarantees geometric decay of the bias towards the invariant measure independently of the initialization for all functions controlled by a dominating function V. A key advantage of the approach is that it bypasses the need to establish a global minorization condition, which is often substantially more difficult to verify in practice, while yielding stronger convergence guarantees than global minorization. Optimal convergence bounds in a minimax sense of the framework are established. The utility of the framework is demonstrated through applications to the P'olya-Gamma and Kolmogorov-Gamma Gibbs samplers. We also show qualitative hyper-V uniform ergodicity convergence for two-variable Gibbs samplers can be inferred by the form of the invariant measure, bypassing convergence analysis entirely.
We study the convergence properties of the random-sweep Gibbs sampler for Gaussian graphical models with a thin-membrane prior. We demonstrate that the convergence rate of the Gibbs sampler is significantly accelerated in the dual model, which is obtained by applying the Fourier transform to the local factors of the normal factor graph representing the original model. In both domains, we derive the exact convergence rates for homogeneous $k$-regular graphs. We prove that, for all homogeneous models whose graphical representations contain cycles, the convergence rate in the dual domain is universal and independent of the underlying graph topology. Moreover, we show that the effective convergence rate in the dual domain is governed by the algebraic connectivity of the graph, providing an additional acceleration without increasing the computational complexity per sweep. We further establish an explicit algebraic relation between the covariance structures of the primal and dual models, enabling marginal statistics of the primal model to be recovered directly from those of the dual model. Finally, numerical experiments on several graph families confirm our theoretical results and demonstrate substantial improvements in the convergence rates in various settings.
Borna Khodabandeh, Mehdi Molkaraie· arXiv.org· 0 citations
A new class of uniformly ergodic MCMC algorithms, termed Diffeomorphic Contraction Sampler (DCS), is introduced, and fast non-asymptotic mixing guarantees for DCS targeting distributions on $\R^d$ with arbitrarily heavy polynomial tails are provided.
We study Brownian motion in R^d conditioned so that the time average of a continuous confining potential remains below a fixed level. On every fixed initial time interval, we prove that the conditioned process converges in total variation to the ground-state diffusion associated with a suitable Schr\"odinger operator. We also obtain sharp asymptotics for the probability of the conditioning event, including bounded perturbations of the constraint. The proof is based on a local limit theorem for the corresponding Feynman-Kac measures. Our results extend the previously known one-dimensional quadratic case to arbitrary finite dimension and a broad class of confining potentials, therefore resolving a conjecture of Aurzada, Lifshits and Schickentanz. The presented approach also works when Brownian motion is replaced by suitable reversible Markov processes, including multidimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, CIR processes and continuous-time Markov chains.
Affine-invariant ensemble samplers are widely used in Bayesian applications. However, their quantitative convergence theory, in particular geometric ergodicity, remains a basic open question. We study the affine invariant ensemble Langevin dynamics, an interacting particle system that uses the empirical covariance of the whole ensemble as a preconditioner. While effective in practice, theoretical understanding of this method is not available beyond plain qualitative convergence in total variation; a central difficulty is that the empirical covariance can approach singularity. This paper addresses this challenge. For potentials with bounded Hessian that are strongly convex outside a ball, we prove geometric ergodicity using a novel Lyapunov function that combines an inverse-covariance barrier with a coercive exponential energy. We then show that directly applying the Euler--Maruyama scheme can diverge with positive probability, even for a one-dimensional Gaussian target. This motivates a covariance-trace time regularization. We prove geometric ergodicity of the regularized diffusion and, for sufficiently small step size, of its unadjusted Euler--Maruyama discretization. We also show that the invariant distributions of the discretization converge weakly to the product target distribution as the step size tends to zero.
We give a new proof of the Bernoulli theorem, conjectured by Talagrand and proved in the seminal work of Bednorz and Lata{\l}a. Our approach is based on information-theoretic ideas: lower bounds on the supremum of a Bernoulli process are translated to the fundamental limits of Bayesian estimation in a Cauchy additive channel. This leads to a new information-theoretic functional that characterizes Bernoulli-process suprema and plays a role analogous to Fernique's majorizing-measure functional for Gaussian processes. The same viewpoint yields a distributional strengthening: for any prescribed law of the index, we characterize the largest expected value attainable over all couplings of that index with the Bernoulli process. This extends to Bernoulli processes a phenomenon previously understood for Gaussian processes through the work of Fernique and Talagrand.
