User-friendly guarantees for the Langevin Monte Carlo with inaccurate gradient

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Main Authors: Dalalyan, Arnak S., Karagulyan, Avetik G.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2017
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author Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik G.
author_facet Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik G.
contents In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly overdamped) Langevin diffusion and establish guarantees on its error measured in the Wasserstein-2 distance. Our guarantees improve or extend the state-of-the-art results in three directions. First, we provide an upper bound on the error of the first-order Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with optimized varying step-size. This result has the advantage of being horizon free (we do not need to know in advance the target precision) and to improve by a logarithmic factor the corresponding result for the constant step-size. Second, we study the case where accurate evaluations of the gradient of the log-density are unavailable, but one can have access to approximations of the aforementioned gradient. In such a situation, we consider both deterministic and stochastic approximations of the gradient and provide an upper bound on the sampling error of the first-order LMC that quantifies the impact of the gradient evaluation inaccuracies. Third, we establish upper bounds for two versions of the second-order LMC, which leverage the Hessian of the log-density. We provide nonasymptotic guarantees on the sampling error of these second-order LMCs. These guarantees reveal that the second-order LMC algorithms improve on the first-order LMC in ill-conditioned settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1710_00095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2017
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle User-friendly guarantees for the Langevin Monte Carlo with inaccurate gradient
Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik G.
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
Probability
Computation
In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly overdamped) Langevin diffusion and establish guarantees on its error measured in the Wasserstein-2 distance. Our guarantees improve or extend the state-of-the-art results in three directions. First, we provide an upper bound on the error of the first-order Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with optimized varying step-size. This result has the advantage of being horizon free (we do not need to know in advance the target precision) and to improve by a logarithmic factor the corresponding result for the constant step-size. Second, we study the case where accurate evaluations of the gradient of the log-density are unavailable, but one can have access to approximations of the aforementioned gradient. In such a situation, we consider both deterministic and stochastic approximations of the gradient and provide an upper bound on the sampling error of the first-order LMC that quantifies the impact of the gradient evaluation inaccuracies. Third, we establish upper bounds for two versions of the second-order LMC, which leverage the Hessian of the log-density. We provide nonasymptotic guarantees on the sampling error of these second-order LMCs. These guarantees reveal that the second-order LMC algorithms improve on the first-order LMC in ill-conditioned settings.
title User-friendly guarantees for the Langevin Monte Carlo with inaccurate gradient
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
Probability
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.00095