Mathematical Physics and Harmonic Analysis Seminar

Date: February 3, 2023

Time: 1:50PM - 2:50PM

Location: BLOC 302

Speaker: Patricia Ning, TAMU

Title: Mosco Convergence of Dirichlet Forms on Machine Learning Gibbs Measures

Abstract: The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm as the most classical MCMC algorithm, has had a great influence on the development and practice of science and engineering. The behavior of the MH algorithm in high-dimensional problems is typically investigated through a weak convergence result of diffusion processes. In this paper, we introduce Mosco convergence of Dirichlet forms in analyzing the MH algorithm on large graphs, whose target distribution is the Gibbs measure that includes any probability measure satisfying a Markov property. The abstract and powerful theory of Dirichlet forms allows us to work directly and naturally on the infinite-dimensional space, and our notion of Mosco convergence allows Dirichlet forms associated with the MH Markov chains to lie on changing Hilbert spaces. Through the optimal scaling problem, we demonstrate the impressive strengths of the Dirichlet form approach over the standard diffusion approach.