Convergence in total variation for the kinetic Langevin algorithm

Abstract

We prove non-asymptotic total variation estimates for the kinetic Langevin algorithm in high dimension when the target measure satisfies a Poincaré inequality and has gradient Lipschitz potential. The main point is that the estimate improves significantly upon the corresponding bound for the non-kinetic version of the algorithm, due to Dalalyan. In particular, the dimension dependence drops from $O(n)$ to $O(\sqrt{n})$.