Stability of doubly-intractable distributions

Michael Habeck, Daniel Rudolf, Björn Sprungk

Abstract: Doubly-intractable distributions appear naturally as posterior distributions in Bayesian inference frameworks whenever the likelihood contains a normalizing function $Z$. Having two such functions $Z$ and $\widetilde Z$ we provide estimates of the total variation and Wasserstein distance of the resulting posterior probability measures. As a consequence this leads to local Lipschitz continuity w.r.t. $Z$. In the more general framework of a random function $\widetilde Z$ we derive bounds on the expected total variation and expected Wasserstein distance. The applicability of the estimates is illustrated within the setting of two representative Monte Carlo recovery scenarios.