English

Excessive symmetry can preclude cutoff

Combinatorics 2021-09-22 v1 Probability

Abstract

For each n,r0n,r \geq 0, let KG(n,r)KG(n,r) denote the Kneser Graph; that whose vertices are labeled by rr-element subsets of nn, and whose edges indicate that the corresponding subsets are disjoint. Fixing rr and allowing nn to vary, one obtains a family of nested graphs, each equipped with a natural action by a symmetric group Sn\mathfrak{S}_n, such that these actions are compatible and transitive. Families of graphs of this form were introduced by the authors in [RW], while a systematic study of random walks on these families were considered in [RW2]. In this paper we illustrate that these random walks never exhibit the so-called product condition, and therefore also never display total variation cutoff as defined by Aldous and Diaconis [AD]. In particular, we provide a large family of algebro-combinatorially motivated examples of collections of Markov chains which satisfy some well-known algebraic heuristics for cutoff, while not actually having the property.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.10281,
  title  = {Excessive symmetry can preclude cutoff},
  author = {Eric Ramos and Graham White},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10281},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.08475

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:11:25.961Z