Rates in the Central Limit Theorem and diffusion approximation via Stein's Method

Abstract

We present a way to use Stein's method in order to bound the Wasserstein distance of order $2$ between two measures $\nu$ and $\mu$ supported on $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that $\mu$ is the reversible measure of a diffusion process. In order to apply our result, we only require to have access to a stochastic process $(X_t)_{t \geq 0}$ such that $X_t$ is drawn from $\nu$ for any $t > 0$. We then show that, whenever $\mu$ is the Gaussian measure $\gamma$, one can use a slightly different approach to bound the Wasserstein distances of order $p \geq 1$ between $\nu$ and $\gamma$ under an additional exchangeability assumption on the stochastic process $(X_t)_{t \geq 0}$. Using our results, we are able to obtain convergence rates for the multi-dimensional Central Limit Theorem in terms of Wasserstein distances of order $p \geq 2$. Our results can also provide bounds for steady-state diffusion approximation, allowing us to tackle two problems appearing in the field of data analysis by giving a quantitative convergence result for invariant measures of random walks on random geometric graphs and by providing quantitative guarantees for a Monte Carlo sampling algorithm.