A diffusion approach to Stein’s method on Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

We detail an approach to developing Stein’s method for bounding integral metrics on probability measures defined on a Riemannian manifold M. Our approach exploits the relationship between the generator of a diffusion on M having a target invariant measure and its characterising Stein operator. We consider a pair of such diffusions with different starting points, and through analysis of the distance process between the pair, derive Stein factors, which bound the solution to the Stein equation and its derivatives. The Stein factors contain curvature-dependent terms and reduce to those currently available for ${\mathbb{R}}^m$, and moreover imply that the bounds for ${\mathbb{R}}^m$ remain valid when M is a flat manifold.