Related papers: Total-variation cutoff in birth-and-death chains

We consider the averaging process on a graph, that is the evolution of a mass distribution undergoing repeated averages along the edges of the graph at the arrival times of independent Poisson processes. We establish cutoff phenomena for…

We establish metastability in the sense of Lebowitz and Penrose under practical and simple hypothesis for (families of) Markov chains on finite configuration space in some asymptotic regime, including the case of configuration space size…

Using elementary methods, we prove that for a countable Markov chain $P$ of ergodic degree $d > 0$ the rate of convergence towards the stationary distribution is subgeometric of order $n^{-d}$, provided the initial distribution satisfies…

In a first part, we prove a Lyapunov-type criterion for the $\xi\_1$-positive recurrence of absorbed birth and death processes and provide new results on the domain of attraction of the minimal quasi-stationary distribution. In a second…

We present a general method to derive the metastable behavior of weakly mixing Markov chains. This approach is based on properties of the resolvent equations and can be applied to metastable dynamics which do not satisfy the mixing…

A time-dependent finite-state Markov chain that uses doubly stochastic transition matrices, is considered. Entropic quantities that describe the randomness of the probability vectors, and also the randomness of the discrete paths, are…

We bound the rate of convergence to stationarity for a signed generalization of the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model; this signed generalization is a Markov chain on the homogeneous space (Z_2 \wr S_n) / (S_r \times S_{n-r}). Specifically,…

The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process in discrete time is considered on finite rings with fixed number of particles. A translation-invariant version of the backward-ordered sequential update is defined for periodic boundary…

We use the correlation matrix of the generating distribution to determine the mixing time for random walks on the torus $(\mathbb{Z}/q\mathbb{Z})^n$. We present our method in the context of the Diaconis-Gangolli random walk on both the $1…

Aldous, Evans and Pitman (1998) studied the behavior of the fragmentation process derived from deleting the edges of a uniform random tree on $n$ labelled vertices. In particular, they showed that, after proper rescaling, the above…

Many finite-state reversible Markov chains can be naturally decomposed into "projection" and "restriction" chains. In this paper we provide bounds on the total variation mixing times of the original chain in terms of the mixing properties…

Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…

Splitting trees are those random trees where individuals give birth at constant rate during a lifetime with general distribution, to i.i.d. copies of themselves. The width process of a splitting tree is then a binary, homogeneous…

We prove that the mixing time of driven-dissipative activated random walk on an interval of length $n$ with uniform or central driving exhibits cutoff at $n$ times the critical density for activated random walk on the integers. The proof…

For a discrete time Markov chain and in line with Strotz' consistent planning we develop a framework for problems of optimal stopping that are time-inconsistent due to the consideration of a non-linear function of an expected reward. We…

We introduce a continuous-time Markov chain describing dynamic allelic partitions which extends the branching process construction of the Pitman sampling formula in Pitman (2006) and the birth-and-death process with immigration studied in…

A switching random walk, commonly known under the misnomer `oscillating random walk', is a real-valued Markov chain whose distribution of increments is determined by the sign of the current position. We explicitly identify an invariant…

This article provides the first procedure for computing a fully data-dependent interval that traps the mixing time $t_{\text{mix}}$ of a finite reversible ergodic Markov chain at a prescribed confidence level. The interval is computed from…

We present a recurrence-transience classification for discrete-time Markov chains on manifolds with negative curvature. Our classification depends only on geometric quantities associated to the increments of the chain, defined via the…

We prove a conjecture of Diaconis and Freedman (Ann. Probab. 1980) characterising the extreme points of the set of partially-exchangeable processes on a countable set. More concretely, we prove that the partially exchangeable sigma-algebra…