A new cutoff criterion for non-negatively curved chains

Abstract

The cutoff phenomenon was recently shown to systematically follow from non-negative curvature and the product condition, for all Markov diffusions. The proof crucially relied on a classical \emph{chain rule} satisfied by the carr\'e du champ operator, which is specific to differential generators and hence fails on discrete spaces. In the present paper, we show that an approximate version of this chain rule in fact always holds, with an extra cost that depends on the log-Lipschitz regularity of the considered observable. As a consequence, we derive a new cutoff criterion for non-negatively curved chains on finite spaces. The latter allows us to recover, in a simple and unified way, a number of historical instances of cutoff that had been established through model-specific arguments. Emblematic examples include random walk on the hypercube, random transpositions, random walk on the multislice, or MCMC samplers for popular spin systems such as the Ising and Hard-core models on bounded-degree graphs.