We study the problem of sampling from a probability distribution π on Rᵈ which has a density w.r.t. the Lebesgue measure known up to a normalization factor x↦ e-U(x)/∫ _Rᵈe-U(y)\,dy. We analyze a sampling method based on the Euler discretization of the Langevin stochastic differential equations under the assumptions that the potential U is continuously differentiable, ∇ U is Lipschitz, and U is strongly concave. We focus on the case where the gradient of the log-density cannot be directly computed but unbiased estimates of the gradient from possibly dependent observations are available. This setting can be seen as a combination of a stochastic approximation (here stochastic gradient) type algorithms with discretized Langevin dynamics. We obtain an upper bound of the Wasserstein-2 distance between the law of the iterates of this algorithm and the target distribution π with constants depending explicitly on the Lipschitz and strong convexity constants of the potential and the dimension of the space. Finally, under weaker assumptions on U and its gradient but in the presence of independent observations, we obtain analogous results in Wasserstein-2 distance.
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Barkhagen et al. (2020) studied this question.
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