Long Time Results for a Weakly Interacting Particle System in Discrete Time

We study long time behavior of a discrete time weakly interacting particle system, and the corresponding nonlinear Markov process in [GRAPHICS] , described in terms of a general stochastic evolution equation. In a setting where the state space of the particles is compact such questions have been studied in previous works, however, for the case of an unbounded state space very few results are available. Under suitable assumptions on the problem data we study several time asymptotic properties of the N-particle system and the associated nonlinear Markov chain. In particular, we show that the evolution equation for the law of the nonlinear Markov chain has a unique fixed point and starting from an arbitrary initial condition convergence to the fixed point occurs at an exponential rate. The empirical measure mu(N)(n) of the N-particles at time n is shown to converge to the law mu(n) of the nonlinear Markov process at time n, in the Wasserstein-1 distance, in L-1, as N -> infinity, uniformly in n. Several consequences of this uniform convergence are studied, including the interchangeability of the limits n -> infinity and N -> infinity and the propagation of chaos property at n = infinity. Rate of convergence of mu(N)(n) to mu(n) is studied by establishing uniform in time polynomial and exponential probability concentration estimates.