Exponentially slow mixing in the mean-field Swendsen-Wang dynamics

Abstract

Swendsen-Wang dynamics for the Potts model was proposed in the late 1980's as an alternative to single-site heat-bath dynamics, in which global updates allow this MCMC sampler to switch between metastable states and ideally mix faster. Gore and Jerrum (1997) found that this dynamics may in fact exhibit slow mixing: they showed that, for the Potts model with q ≥ 3 colors on the complete graph on n vertices at the critical pointc(q), Swendsen-Wang dynamics has tmix ≥ exp(√c/n). Galanis et al. (2015) showed that tmix exp(cn1=3) throughout the critical window (βs; βS) around βc, and Blanca and Sinclair (2015) established that tmix ≥ exp(c p n) in the critical window for corresponding mean-field FK model, which implied the same bound for Swendsen-Wang via known comparison estimates. In both cases, an upper bound of tmix β exp(c0n) was known. Here we show that the mixing time is truly exponential in n: namely, tmix β exp(cn) for Swendsen-Wang dynamics when q ≥ 3 and β ϵ (βs; βS), and the same bound holds for the related MCMC samplers for the mean-field FK model when q > 2.