arXiv subjects

William R. P. Hammersley

Publications and source records attributed to William R. P. Hammersley.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Rearranged Stochastic Heat Equation: Ergodicity and Related Gradient Descent on ${\mathcal P}({\mathbb R})$

This article provides a case study for a recently introduced diffusion in the space of probability measures over the reals, namely rearranged stochastic heat, which solves a stochastic partial differential equation valued in the set of symmetrised quantile functions over the unit circle. This contribution studies probability measure-valued flows perturbed by this noise with a special focus on gradient flows. This is done by introducing a drift to the rearranged stochastic heat equation by means of a vector field from the set of random variables over the unit circle into itself. When the flow is a gradient flow, the vector field may coincide with the Wasserstein derivative of a mean-field potential function. The resulting equation reads as a sort of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation with an infinite dimensional common noise. This article provides conditions on the drift under which solutions exist uniquely for any time horizon and converge exponentially fast towards a unique equilibrium. When the drift derives from a potential, some metastability properties are obtained as the intensity of the noise is tuned to zero: it is shown that under a particular scaling regime, the gradient descent lingers near local minimizers for expected times of the same order as in the finite dimensional setting.

math.PR↗

arXiv2024

Itô's Formula for the Rearranged Stochastic Heat Equation

The purpose of this short note is to prove a convenient version of Itô's formula for the Rearranged Stochastic Heat Equation (RSHE) introduced by the two authors in a previous contribution. This equation is a penalised version of the standard Stochastic Heat Equation (SHE) on the circle subject to a coloured noise, whose solution is constrained to stay within the set of symmetric quantile functions by means of a reflection term. Here, we identity the generator of the solution when it is acting on functions defined on the space ${\mathcal P}_2({\mathbb R})$ (of one-dimensional probability measures with a finite second moment) that are assumed to be smooth in Lions' sense. In particular, we prove that the reflection term in the RSHE is orthogonal to the Lions (or Wasserstein) derivative of smooth functions defined on ${\mathcal P}_2({\mathbb R})$. The proof relies on non-trivial bounds for the gradient of the solution to the RSHE.

math.PR↗

arXiv2024

Rearranged Stochastic Heat Equation

The purpose of this work is to provide an explicit construction of a strong Feller semigroup on the space of probability measures over the real line that additionally maps bounded measurable functions into Lipschitz continuous functions, with a Lipschitz constant that blows up in an integrable manner in small time. Our construction relies on a rearranged version of the stochastic heat equation on the circle driven by a coloured noise. Formally, this stochastic equation writes as a reflected equation in infinite dimension. Under the action of the rearrangement, the solution is forced to live in a space of quantile functions that is isometric to the space of probability measures on the real line. We prove the equation to be solvable by means of an Euler scheme in which we alternate flat dynamics in the space of random variables on the circle with a rearrangement operation that projects back the random variables onto the subset of quantile functions. A first challenge is to prove that this scheme is tight. A second one is to provide a consistent theory for the limiting reflected equation and in particular to interpret in a relevant manner the reflection term. The last step in our work is to establish the aforementioned Lipschitz property of the semigroup by adapting earlier ideas from the Bismut-Elworthy-Li formula.

math.PR↗

arXiv2020

Weak Existence and Uniqueness for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with Common Noise

This paper concerns the McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation (SDE) with common noise. An appropriate definition of a weak solution to such an equation is developed. The importance of the notion of compatibility in this definition is highlighted by a demonstration of its rôle in connecting weak solutions to McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and solutions to corresponding stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). By keeping track of the dependence structure between all components in a sequence of approximating processes, a compactness argument is employed to prove the existence of a weak solution assuming boundedness and joint continuity of the coefficients (allowing for degenerate diffusions). Weak uniqueness is established when the private (idiosyncratic) noise's diffusion coefficient is non-degenerate and the drift is regular in the total variation distance. This seems sharp when one considers using finite-dimensional noise to regularise an infinite dimensional problem. The proof relies on a suitably tailored cost function in the Monge-Kantorovich problem and representation of weak solutions via Girsanov transformations.

math.PR↗