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.

The Bouncy Particle sampler (BPS) and the Zig-Zag sampler (ZZS) are continuous time, non-reversible Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes. Experiments show that the speed of convergence of these samplers can be affected by the shape of the target distribution, as for instance in the case of anisotropic targets. We propose an adaptive scheme that iteratively learns all or part of the covariance matrix of the target and takes advantage of the obtained information to modify the underlying process with the aim of increasing the speed of convergence. Moreover, we define an adaptive scheme that automatically tunes the refreshment rate of the BPS or ZZS. We prove ergodicity and a law of large numbers for all the proposed adaptive algorithms. Finally, we show the benefits of the adaptive samplers with several numerical simulations.