adaptive independent Metropolis-Hastings

When rereading this paper by Halden et al. (2009), I was reminded of the earlier and somewhat under-appreciated Gåsemyr (2003). But I find the convergence results therein rather counter-intuitive in that they seem to justify adaptive independent proposals with no strong requirement. Besides the massive Doeblin condition:

“The Doeblin condition essentially requires that all the proposal distribution [sic] has uniformly heavier tails than the target distribution.”

Even when the adaptation is based on an history vector made of rejected values and non-replicated accepted values. Actually  convergence of this sequence of adaptive proposals kernels is established under a concentration of the Doeblin constants a¹,a²,… towards one, in the sense that

E[(1-a¹)(1-a²)…]=0.

The reason may be that, with chains satisfying a Doeblin condition, there is a probability to reach stationarity at each step. Equal to a¹, a², … And hence to ignore adaptivity since each kernel keep the target π invariant. So in the end this is not so astounding. (The paper also reminded me of Wolfgang [or Vincent] Doeblin‘s short and tragic life.)