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Stochastic Langevin Monte Carlo for (weakly) log-concave posterior distributions

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a continuous time version of the Stochastic Langevin Monte Carlo method, introduced in [WT11], that incorporates a stochastic sampling step inside the traditional over-damped Langevin diffusion. This method is popular in machine learning for sampling posterior distribution. We will pay specific attention in our work to the computational cost in terms of nn (the number of observations that produces the posterior distribution), and dd (the dimension of the ambient space where the parameter of interest is living). We derive our analysis in the weakly convex framework, which is parameterized with the help of the Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz (KL) inequality, that permits to handle a vanishing curvature settings, which is far less restrictive when compared to the simple strongly convex case. We establish that the final horizon of simulation to obtain an ε\varepsilon approximation (in terms of entropy) is of the order (dlog(n)2)(1+r)2[log2(ε1)+n2d2(1+r)log4(1+r)(n)]( d \log(n)^2 )^{(1+r)^2} [\log^2(\varepsilon^{-1}) + n^2 d^{2(1+r)} \log^{4(1+r)}(n) ] with a Poissonian subsampling of parameter (n(dlog2(n))1+r)1\left(n ( d \log^2(n))^{1+r}\right)^{-1}, where the parameter rr is involved in the KL inequality and varies between 00 (strongly convex case) and 11 (limiting Laplace situation).

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