Related papers: Carries, shuffling, and symmetric functions

The Tsetlin library is a very well studied model for the way an arrangement of books on a library shelf evolves over time. One of the most interesting properties of this Markov chain is that its spectrum can be computed exactly and that the…

This paper is devoted to a study of the multiple recurrence of two commuting transformations. We derive a result which is similar but not identical to that of one single transformation established by Bergelson, Host and Kra. We will use the…

We show that, under suitable conditions, an operator acting like a shift on some sequence space has a frequently hypercyclic random vector whose distribution is strongly mixing for the operator. This result will be applied to chaotic…

The well-known Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles assumes that the cards are initially cut 'about in half' and then riffled together. We analyze a natural variant where the initial cut is biased. Extending results of Fulman…

We study an irreducible Markov chain on the category of finite abelian $p$-groups, whose stationary measure is the Cohen-Lenstra distribution. This Markov chain arises when one studies the cokernel of a random matrix $M$, after conditioning…

Iterative load balancing algorithms for indivisible tokens have been studied intensively in the past. Complementing previous worst-case analyses, we study an average-case scenario where the load inputs are drawn from a fixed probability…

We introduce the Hilbert-Galton board as a variant of the classical Galton board. Balls fall into a row of bins at a rate depending on the bin, and at random times, each bin gets shifted one unit to the right and an empty bin is added to…

We investigate multivariate regular variation in the context of time-homogeneous Markov chains on general vector spaces and in random coefficient linear models. In the first part, we show that the regular variation of the stationary…

The preparation of the stationary distribution of irreducible, time-reversible Markov chains is a fundamental building block in many heuristic approaches to algorithmically hard problems. It has been conjectured that quantum analogs of…

We introduce a natural conjugate prior for the transition matrix of a reversible Markov chain. This allows estimation and testing. The prior arises from random walk with reinforcement in the same way the Dirichlet prior arises from…

We contribute to approximate algorithms for the quadratic assignment problem also known as graph matching. Inspired by the success of the fusion moves technique developed for multilabel discrete Markov random fields, we investigate its…

We prove sharp rates of convergence to the Ewens equilibrium distribution for a family of Metropolis algorithms based on the random transposition shuffle on the symmetric group, with starting point at the identity. The proofs rely heavily…

In an earlier paper we introduced a notion of Markov automaton, together with parallel operations which permit the compositional description of Markov processes. We illustrated by showing how to describe a system of n dining philosophers,…

Let $G$ be a finite group and let $H$ be a subgroup of $G$. The left-invariant random walk driven by a probability measure $w$ on $G$ is the Markov chain in which from any state $x \in G$, the probability of stepping to $xg \in G$ is…

The theory of ``Markov-up'' processes is being developed. This is a new class of stochastic processes with ``partial'' markovian features; it could also be called ``one-sided Markov''. Such a behavior may be found in the real world and in…

In this paper, we study the biased random transposition shuffle, a natural generalization of the classical random transposition shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani. We diagonalize the transition matrix of the shuffle and use these…

We give computable bounds on the rate of convergence of the transition probabilities to the stationary distribution for a certain class of geometrically ergodic Markov chains. Our results are different from earlier estimates of Meyn and…

We develop a formalism to address statistical pattern recognition of graph valued data. Of particular interest is the case of all graphs having the same number of uniquely labeled vertices. When the vertex labels are latent, such graphs are…

Let $Q$ be a probability measure on a finite group $G$, and let $H$ be a subgroup of $G$. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the random walk driven by $Q$ on $G$ to induce a Markov chain on the double coset space…

Order-preserving couplings are elegant tools for obtaining robust estimates of the time-dependent and stationary distributions of Markov processes that are too complex to be analyzed exactly. The starting point of this paper is to study…