English

An entropic approach for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: the idealized case

Probability 2023-06-06 v5

Abstract

Quantitative long-time entropic convergence and short-time regularization are established for an idealized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo chain which alternatively follows an Hamiltonian dynamics for a fixed time and then partially or totally refreshes its velocity with an auto-regressive Gaussian step. These results, in discrete time, are the analogous of similar results for the continuous-time kinetic Langevin diffusion, and the latter can be obtained from our bounds in a suitable limit regime. The dependency in the log-Sobolev constant of the target measure is sharp and is illustrated on a mean-field case and on a low-temperature regime, with an application to the simulated annealing algorithm. The practical unadjusted algorithm is briefly discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.13405,
  title  = {An entropic approach for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: the idealized case},
  author = {Pierre Monmarché},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.13405},
  year   = {2023}
}