HOGWILD!-Gibbs can be PanAccurate

Daskalakis, Constantinos, Dikkala, Nishanth, Jayanti, Siddhartha

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Asynchronous Gibbs sampling has been recently shown to be fast-mixing and an accurate method for estimating probabilities of events on a small number of variables of a graphical model satisfying Dobrushin's condition \cite{DeSaOR16}. We investigate whether it can be used to accurately estimate expectations of functions of {\em all the variables} of the model. Under the same condition, we show that the synchronous (sequential) and asynchronous Gibbs samplers can be coupled so that the expected Hamming distance between their (multivariate) samples remains bounded by $O(\tau \log n),$ where $n$ is the number of variables in the graphical model, and $\tau$ is a measure of the asynchronicity. A similar bound holds for any constant power of the Hamming distance. Hence, the expectation of any function that is Lipschitz with respect to a power of the Hamming distance, can be estimated with a bias that grows logarithmically in $n$.