arXiv2022
We study the problem of unbiased estimation of expectations with respect to (w.r.t.) $π$ a given, general probability measure on $(\mathbb{R}^d,\mathcal{B}(\mathbb{R}^d))$ that is absolutely continuous with respect to a standard Gaussian measure. We focus on simulation associated to a particular class of diffusion processes, sometimes termed the Schrödinger-Föllmer Sampler, which is a simulation technique that approximates the law of a particular diffusion bridge process $\{X_t\}_{t\in [0,1]}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\in \mathbb{N}_0$. This latter process is constructed such that, starting at $X_0=0$, one has $X_1\sim π$. Typically, the drift of the diffusion is intractable and, even if it were not, exact sampling of the associated diffusion is not possible. As a result, \cite{sf_orig,jiao} consider a stochastic Euler-Maruyama scheme that allows the development of biased estimators for expectations w.r.t.~$π$. We show that for this methodology to achieve a mean square error of $\mathcal{O}(ε^2)$, for arbitrary $ε>0$, the associated cost is $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-5})$. We then introduce an alternative approach that provides unbiased estimates of expectations w.r.t.~$π$, that is, it does not suffer from the time discretization bias or the bias related with the approximation of the drift function. We prove that to achieve a mean square error of $\mathcal{O}(ε^2)$, the associated cost is, with high probability, $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2}|\log(ε)|^{2+δ})$, for any $δ>0$. We implement our method on several examples including Bayesian inverse problems.