This paper aims to provide differential privacy (DP) guarantees for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In a first part, we establish DP guarantees on samples output by MCMC algorithms as well as Monte Carlo estimators associated with these methods under assumptions on the convergence properties of the underlying Markov chain. In particular, our results highlight the critical condition of ensuring the target distribution is differentially private itself. In a second part, we specialise our analysis to the unadjusted Langevin algorithm and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics and establish guarantees on their (Rényi) DP. To this end, we develop a novel methodology based on Girsanov’s theorem combined with a perturbation trick to obtain bounds for an unbounded domain and in a non-convex setting. We establish: (i) uniform in $n$ privacy guarantees when the state of the chain after $n$ iterations is released, (ii) bounds on the privacy of the entire chain trajectory. These findings provide concrete guidelines for privacy-preserving MCMC.

In this article we consider sampling from log concave distributions in Hamiltonian setting, without assuming that the objective gradient is globally Lipschitz. We propose two algorithms based on monotone polygonal (tamed) Euler schemes, to sample from a target measure, and provide non-asymptotic 2-Wasserstein distance bounds between the law of the process of each algorithm and the target measure. Finally, we apply these results to bound the excess risk optimization error of the associated optimization problem.

In recent years tamed schemes have become an important technique for simulating SDEs and SPDEs whose continuous coefficients display superlinear growth. The taming method, which involves curbing the growth of the coefficients as a function of stepsize, has so far however not been adapted to preserve the monotonicity of the coefficients. This has arisen as an issue particularly in [4], where the lack of a strongly monotonic tamed scheme forces strong conditions on the setting. In the present work we give a novel and explicit method for truncating monotonic functions in separable real Hilbert spaces, and show how this can be used to define a polygonal (tamed) Euler scheme on a finite dimensional space, preserving the monotonicity of the drift coefficient, and converging to the true solution at the same rate as the classical Euler scheme for Lipschitz coefficients. This new method of truncation is well-defined with almost no assumptions and, unlike the well-known Moreau-Yosida regularisation, does not require an optimisation problem to be solved at each evaluation. Our construction is the first infinite dimensional method for truncating monotone functions that we are aware of, as well as the first explicit method in any number of dimensions.