Sampling from convex sets with a cold start using multiscale decompositions

A standard approach to sample approximately uniformly from a convex body $K\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$ is to run a random walk within $K$. The requirement is that from a suitable initial distribution, the distribution of the walk comes close to the uniform distribution $\pi_K$ on $K$ after a number of steps polynomial in $n$ and the aspect ratio $R/r$ (here, $K$ is assumed to contain a ball of radius $r$ and to be contained in a ball of radius $R$). Proofs of rapid mixing of such walks often require the probability density $\eta_0$ of the initial distribution with respect to $\pi_K$ to be at most $\mathrm{poly}(n)$: this is called a "warm start". Achieving a warm start often requires non-trivial pre-processing before starting the random walk. This motivates proving rapid mixing from a "cold start", wherein $\eta_0$ can be as high as $\exp(\mathrm{poly}(n))$. Unlike warm starts, a cold start is usually trivial to achieve. However, a random walks need not mix rapidly from a cold start: an example being the well-known "ball walk". On the other hand, Lov\'asz and Vempala proved that the "hit-and-run" random walk mixes rapidly from a cold start. For the related coordinate hit-and-run (CHR) walk, which has been found to be promising in computational experiments, rapid mixing from a warm start was proved only recently but the question of rapid mixing from a cold start remained open. We construct a family of random walks inspired by classical decompositions of subsets of $\mathbb{R}^n$ into countably many axis-aligned dyadic cubes. We show that even with a cold start, the mixing times of these walks are bounded by a polynomial in $n$ and the aspect ratio. Our main technical ingredient is an isoperimetric inequality for $K$ for a metric that magnifies distances between points close to the boundary of $K$. As a corollary, we show that the CHR walk also mixes rapidly from a cold start.