In this paper we aim to construct infinite dimensional versions of well established Piecewise Deterministic Monte Carlo methods, such as the Bouncy Particle Sampler, the Zig-Zag Sampler and the Boomerang Sampler. In order to do so we provide an abstract infinite dimensional framework for Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) with unbounded event intensities. We further develop exponential convergence to equilibrium of the infinite dimensional Boomerang Sampler, using hypocoercivity techniques. Furthermore we establish how the infinite dimensional Boomerang Sampler admits a finite dimensional approximation, rendering it suitable for computer simulation.

Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) are a class of stochastic processes with applications in several fields of applied mathematics spanning from mathematical modelling of physical phenomena to computational methods. A PDMP is specified by three characteristic quantities: the deterministic motion, the law of the random event times, and the jump kernels. The applicability of PDMPs to real world scenarios is currently limited by the fact that these processes can be simulated only when these three characteristics of the process can be simulated exactly. In order to overcome this problem, we introduce discretisation schemes for PDMPs which make their approximate simulation possible. In particular, we design both first order and higher order schemes that rely on approximations of one or more of the three characteristics. For the proposed approximation schemes we study both pathwise convergence to the continuous PDMP as the step size converges to zero and convergence in law to the invariant measure of the PDMP in the long time limit. Moreover, we apply our theoretical results to several PDMPs that arise from the computational statistics and mathematical biology literature.

We study a population of N particles, which evolve according to a diffusion process and interact through a dynamical network. In turn, the evolution of the network is coupled to the particles' positions. In contrast with the mean-field regime, in which each particle interacts with every other particle, i.e., with O(N) particles, we consider the a priori more difficult case of a sparse network; that is, each particle interacts, on average, with O(1) particles. We also assume that the network's dynamics is much faster than the particles' dynamics, with the time-scale of the network described by a parameter ∊ > 0. We combine the averaging (∊ → 0) and the many-particles (N → ∞ ) limits and prove that the evolution of the particles' empirical density is described (after taking both limits) by a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation; moreover, we give conditions under which such limits can be taken uniformly in time, hence providing a criterion under which the limiting nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation is a good approximation of the original system uniformly in time. The heart of our proof consists of controlling precisely the dependence on N of the averaging estimates.

We study the long time behaviour of a large class of diffusion processes on R^N, generated by second order differential operators of (possibly) degenerate type. The operators that we consider need not satisfy the Hörmander Condition (HC). Instead, they satisfy the so-called UFG condition, introduced by Herman, Lobry and Sussman in the context of geometric control theory and later by Kusuoka and Stroock. We demonstrate the importance of the class of UFG processes in several respects: i) we show that UFG processes constitute a family of SDEs which exhibit, in general, multiple invariant measures (i.e. they are in general non-ergodic) and for which one is able to describe a systematic procedure to study the basin of attraction of each invariant measure (equilibrium state). ii) We use an explicit change of coordinates to prove that every UFG diffusion can be, at least locally, represented as a system consisting of an SDE coupled with an ODE, where the ODE evolves independently of the SDE part of the dynamics. iii) As a result, UFG diffusions are inherently “less smooth" than hypoelliptic SDEs; more precisely, we prove that UFG processes do not admit a density with respect to Lebesgue measure on the entire space, but only on suitable time-evolving submanifolds, which we describe. iv) We show that our results and techniques, which we devised for UFG processes, can be applied to the study of the long-time behaviour of non-autonomous hypoelliptic SDEs and therefore produce several results on this latter class of processes as well. v) Because processes that satisfy the (uniform) parabolic HC are UFG processes, this paper contains a wealth of results about the long time behaviour of (uniformly) hypoelliptic processes which are non-ergodic.

We extend the hypocoercivity framework for piecewise-deterministic Markov process (PDMP) Monte Carlo established in [2] to heavy-tailed target distributions, which exhibit subgeometric rates of convergence to equilibrium. We make use of weak Poincaré inequalities, as developed in the work of [15], the ideas of which we adapt to the PDMPs of interest. On the way we report largely potential-independent approaches to bounding explicitly solutions of the Poisson equation of the Langevin diffusion and its first and second derivatives, required here to control various terms arising in the application of the hypocoercivity result.