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 Poincar\'e 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 $O(\sqrt n)$.