Decentralized Langevin Dynamics

Langevin MCMC gradient optimization is a class of increasingly popular methods for estimating a posterior distribution. This paper addresses the algorithm as applied in a decentralized setting, wherein data is distributed across a network of agents which act to cooperatively solve the problem using peer-to-peer gossip communication. We show, theoretically, results in 1) the time-complexity to ε-consensus for the continuous time stochastic differential equation, 2) convergence rate in L2 norm to consensus for the discrete implementation as defined by the Euler-Maruyama discretization and 3) convergence rate in the Wasserstein metric to the optimal stationary distribution for the discretized dynamics.