Mixing Time Bounds for the Gibbs Sampler under Isoperimetry
Statistics Theory
2026-04-28 v2 Probability
Statistics Theory
Abstract
We establish bounds on the conductance for the systematic-scan and random-scan Gibbs samplers when the target distribution satisfies a Poincar\'e or log-Sobolev inequality and possesses sufficiently regular conditional distributions. These bounds lead to mixing time guarantees that extend beyond the log-concave setting, offering new insights into the convergence behavior of Gibbs sampling in broader regimes. Moreover, we demonstrate that our results remain valid for log-Lipschitz and log-smooth target distributions. Our approach relies on novel isoperimetric inequalities and a sequential coupling argument for the Gibbs sampler.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.22258,
title = {Mixing Time Bounds for the Gibbs Sampler under Isoperimetry},
author = {Alexander Goyal and George Deligiannidis and Nikolas Kantas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.22258},
year = {2026}
}