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A mixing time bound for Gibbs sampling from log-smooth log-concave distributions

Statistics Theory 2024-12-25 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms Machine Learning Statistics Theory

Abstract

The Gibbs sampler, also known as the coordinate hit-and-run algorithm, is a Markov chain that is widely used to draw samples from probability distributions in arbitrary dimensions. At each iteration of the algorithm, a randomly selected coordinate is resampled from the distribution that results from conditioning on all the other coordinates. We study the behavior of the Gibbs sampler on the class of log-smooth and strongly log-concave target distributions supported on Rn\mathbb{R}^n. Assuming the initial distribution is MM-warm with respect to the target, we show that the Gibbs sampler requires at most O(κ2n7.5(max{1,1nlog2Mγ})2)O^{\star}\left(\kappa^2 n^{7.5}\left(\max\left\{1,\sqrt{\frac{1}{n}\log \frac{2M}{\gamma}}\right\}\right)^2\right) steps to produce a sample with error no more than γ\gamma in total variation distance from a distribution with condition number κ\kappa.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.17899,
  title  = {A mixing time bound for Gibbs sampling from log-smooth log-concave distributions},
  author = {Neha S. Wadia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.17899},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

22 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:47:19.700Z