A Spectral Approach to Kemeny's Constant
Combinatorics
2025-03-18 v1 Probability
Abstract
Kemeny's constant quantifies the expected time for a random walk to reach a randomly chosen vertex, providing insight into the global behavior of a Markov chain. We present a novel eigenvector-based formula for computing Kemeny's constant. Moreover, we analyze the impact of network structure on Kemeny's constant. In particular, we use various spectral techniques, such as spectral sparsification of graphs and eigenvalue interlacing, and show that they are particularly useful in this context for deriving approximations and sharp bounds for Kemeny's constant
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.13382,
title = {A Spectral Approach to Kemeny's Constant},
author = {Aida Abiad and Ángeles Carmona and Andrés M. Encinas and Maria José Jiménez and Álvaro Samperio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13382},
year = {2025}
}