English

Concentration Inequalities and UQ Bounds for Hypocoercive MCMC Samplers

Probability 2025-10-13 v2

Abstract

In this work we provide performance guarantees for hypocoercive non-reversible MCMC samplers XtX_t with invariant measure μ\mu_*; our results apply in particular to the Langevin equation, Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo, and the bouncy particle and zig-zag samplers. Specifically, we establish a concentration inequality of Bernstein type for ergodic averages 1T0Tf(Xt)dt\frac{1}{T} \int_0^T f(X_t)\, dt. As a consequence we provide two types of performance guarantees: (a) explicit non-asymptotic confidence intervals for fdμ\int f d\mu_* when using a finite time ergodic average with given initial condition μ\mu and (b) uncertainty quantification (UQ) bounds, expressed in terms of relative entropy rate, on the bias of fdμ\int f d\mu_* when using an alternative or approximate processes X~t\widetilde{X}_t. (Results in (b) generalize results (arXiv:1812.05174) from the authors for coercive dynamics.) The concentration inequality is proved by combining the approach via Feynman-Kac semigroups first noted by Wu with the hypocoercive estimates of Dolbeault, Mouhot and Schmeiser (arXiv:1005.1495) developed for the Langevin equation and generalized to partially deterministic Markov processes by Andrieu et al. (arXiv:1808.08592).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.11973,
  title  = {Concentration Inequalities and UQ Bounds for Hypocoercive MCMC Samplers},
  author = {Jeremiah Birrell and Luc Rey-Bellet},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11973},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:32:48.548Z