Wasserstein contraction and spectral gap of slice sampling revisited

Abstract: We propose a new class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, called $k$-polar slice sampling ($k$-PSS), as a technical tool that interpolates between and extrapolates beyond uniform and polar slice sampling. By examining Wasserstein contraction rates and spectral gaps of $k$-PSS, we obtain strong quantitative results regarding its performance for different kinds of target distributions. Because $k$-PSS contains uniform and polar slice sampling as special cases, our results significantly advance the theoretical understanding of both of these methods. In particular, we prove realistic estimates of the convergence rates of uniform slice sampling for arbitrary multivariate Gaussian distributions on the one hand, and near-arbitrary multivariate t-distributions on the other. Furthermore, our results suggest that for heavy-tailed distributions, polar slice sampling performs dimension-independently well, whereas uniform slice sampling suffers a rather strong curse of dimensionality.