A sharp first order analysis of Feynman-Kac particle models, Part I: Propagation of chaos

This article provides a new theory for the analysis of forward and backward particle approximations of Feynman-Kac models. Such formulae are found in a wide variety of applications and their numerical (particle) approximation is required due to their intractability. Under mild assumptions, we provide sharp and non-asymptotic first order expansions of these particle methods, potentially on path space and for possibly unbounded functions. These expansions allow one to consider upper and lower bound bias type estimates for a given time horizon n and particle number N; these non-asymptotic estimates are O(n∕N). Our approach is extended to tensor products of particle density profiles, leading to new sharp and non-asymptotic propagation of chaos estimates. The resulting upper and lower bound propagations of chaos estimates seem to be the first result of this kind for mean field particle models.