Kinetic walks for sampling

Abstract

The persistent walk is a classical model in kinetic theory, which has also been studied as a toy model for MCMC questions. Its continuous limit, the telegraph process, has recently been extended to various velocity jump processes (Bouncy Particle Sampler, Zig-Zag process, etc.) in order to sample general target distributions on $\mathbb R^d$. This paper studies, from a sampling point of view, general kinetic walks that are natural discrete-time (and possibly discrete-space) counterparts of these continuous-space processes. The main contributions of the paper are the definition and study of a discrete-space Zig-Zag sampler and the definition and time-discretisation of hybrid jump/diffusion kinetic samplers for multi-scale potentials on $\mathbb R^d$.