English

Total variation bound for Kac's random walk

Probability 2012-09-25 v4

Abstract

We show that the classical Kac's random walk on (n1)(n-1)-sphere Sn1S^{n-1} starting from the point mass at e1e_1 mixes in O(n5(logn)3)\mathcal{O}(n^5(\log n)^3) steps in total variation distance. The main argument uses a truncation of the running density after a burn-in period, followed by L2\mathcal{L}^2 convergence using the spectral gap information derived by other authors. This improves upon a previous bound by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste of order O(n2n)\mathcal {O}(n^{2n}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0905.1539,
  title  = {Total variation bound for Kac's random walk},
  author = {Yunjiang Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0905.1539},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AAP810 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:00:23.823Z