English

Computing cutoff times of birth and death chains

Probability 2015-02-03 v1

Abstract

Earlier work by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste gives a spectral criterion for a maximum separation cutoff to occur for birth and death chains. Ding, Lubetzky and Peres gave a related criterion for a maximum total variation cutoff to occur in the same setting. Here, we provide complementary results which allow us to compute the cutoff times and windows in a variety of examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.00361,
  title  = {Computing cutoff times of birth and death chains},
  author = {Guan-Yu Chen and Laurent Saloff-Coste},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.00361},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:18:33.625Z