Related papers: Total-variation cutoff in birth-and-death chains
This paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of birth and death chains to converge abruptly to stationarity, that is, to present a cut-off. The condition involves the notions of spectral gap and mixing time. Y. Peres…
A sequence of Markov chains is said to exhibit (total variation) cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is abrupt. We consider reversible lazy chains. We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the…
An aperiodic and irreducible Markov chain on a finite state space converges to its stationary distribution. When convergence to equilibrium is measured by total variation distance, there exists an optimal coupling and a maximal coupling…
The cutoff phenomenon describes the case when an abrupt transition occurs in the convergence of a Markov chain to its equilibrium measure. There are various metrics which can be used to measure the distance to equilibrium, each of which…
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…
Let $(X_t)_{t = 0 }^{\infty}$ be an irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chain on a finite state space $\Omega $. Denote its transition matrix by $P$. To avoid periodicity issues (and thus ensuring convergence to equilibrium) one…
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…
A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the context of card…
The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of an ergodic finite Markov chain to equilibrium. Of particular interest is understanding this convergence for the simple random walk on a bounded-degree expander graph.…
The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of a family of ergodic finite Markov chains to equilibrium. Many natural families of chains are believed to exhibit cutoff, and yet establishing this fact is often…
We study convergence to equilibrium for a large class of Markov chains in random environment. The chains are sparse in the sense that in every row of the transition matrix $P$ the mass is essentially concentrated on few entries. Moreover,…
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…
Given a sequence $(\mathfrak{X}_i, \mathscr{K}_i)_{i=1}^\infty$ of Markov chains, the cut-off phenomenon describes a period of transition to stationarity which is asymptotically lower order than the mixing time. We study mixing times and…
In this article we study the so-called cut-off phenomenon in the total variation distance when $n\to \infty$ for the family of continuous-time stochastic processes indexed by $n\in \mathbb{N}$, \[ \left( \mathcal{Z}^{(n)}_t=…
A sequence of chains exhibits (total-variation) cutoff (resp., pre-cutoff) if for all $0<\epsilon< 1/2$, the ratio $t_{\mathrm{mix}}^{(n)}(\epsilon)/t_{\mathrm{mix}}^{(n)}(1-\epsilon)$ tends to 1 as $n \to \infty $ (resp., the $\limsup$ of…
A finite ergodic Markov chain exhibits cutoff if its distance to equilibrium remains close to its initial value over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Originally discovered in the…
We make a connection between the continuous time and lazy discrete time Markov chains through the comparison of cutoffs and mixing time in total variation distance. For illustration, we consider finite birth and death chains and provide a…
In this paper we present, in the context of Diaconis' paradigm, a general method to detect the cutoff phenomenon. We use this method to prove cutoff in a variety of models, some already known and others not yet appeared in literature,…
Consider a sequence of continuous-time irreducible reversible Markov chains and a sequence of initial distributions, $\mu_n$. The sequence is said to exhibit $\mu_n$-cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is…
In this article, we consider products of ergodic Markov chains and discuss their cutoffs in the total variation. Through a new inequality relating the total variation and the Hellinger distance, we may identify the total variation cutoffs…