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We investigate the mixing properties of a model of reversible Markov chains in random environment, which notably contains the simple random walk on the superposition of a deterministic graph and a second graph whose vertex set has been…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Bastien Dubail

In this paper, we establish novel concentration inequalities for additive functionals of geometrically ergodic Markov chains similar to Rosenthal inequalities for sums of independent random variables. We pay special attention to the…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-26 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov , Marina Sheshukova

Imprecise continuous-time Markov chains are a robust type of continuous-time Markov chains that allow for partially specified time-dependent parameters. Computing inferences for them requires the solution of a non-linear differential…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-10-11 Alexander Erreygers , Jasper De Bock

We study the limit behaviour of a generally non-linear ordinary differential equation whose solution is a superadditive generalisation of a stochastic matrix, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for this solution to be ergodic,…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-09-21 Jasper De Bock

We prove that any Markov chain that performs local, reversible updates on randomly chosen vertices of a bounded-degree graph necessarily has mixing time at least $\Omega(n\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. Our bound applies to…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Thomas P. Hayes , Alistair Sinclair

Given a strongly stationary Markov chain and a finite set of stopping rules, we prove the existence of a polynomial algorithm which projects the Markov chain onto a minimal Markov chain without redundant information. Markov complexity is…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Giacomo Aletti

In this paper, we consider a general class of two-time-scale Markov chains whose transition rate matrix depends on a parameter $\lambda>0$. We assume that some transition rates of the Markov chain will tend to infinity as…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-07-10 Chen Jia

Let $(X_n \colon n\in\Z)$ be a two-sided recurrent Markov chain with fixed initial state $X_0$ and let $\nu$ be a probability measure on its state space. We give a necessary and sufficient criterion for the existence of a non-randomized…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-06-11 Peter Morters , Istvan Redl

We consider continuous-time Markov chain on a finite state space X. We assume X can be clustered into several subsets such that the intra-transition rates within these subsets are of order $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ comparing to the…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-01-28 Wei Zhang

Estimating the entropy based on data is one of the prototypical problems in distribution property testing and estimation. For estimating the Shannon entropy of a distribution on $S$ elements with independent samples, [Paninski2004] showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , Chuan-Zheng Lee , Tsachy Weissman , Yihong Wu , Tiancheng Yu

We discuss problems posed by the quantitative study of time inhomogeneous Markov chains. The two main notions for our purpose are merging and stability. Merging (also called weak ergodicity) occurs when the chain asymptotically forgets…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-04-15 Laurent Saloff-Coste , Jessica Zuniga

Considering a Markov chain defined on a cycle, near-quadratic improvement of mixing is shown when only a subtle perturbation is introduced to the structure and non-reversible transition probabilities are used. More precisely, a mixing time…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-11-12 Shi Feng , Balázs Gerencsér

It is well known that the distributions of hitting times in Markov chains are quite irregular, unless the limit as time tends to infinity is considered. We show that nevertheless for a typical finite irreducible Markov chain and for…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-01-11 Yuri Bakhtin , Leonid Bunimovich

We study the mixing time of the Rook's Walk Markov chain on a $d$-dimensional chess board of side length $n\geq 3$, where a rook moves by first selecting an axis uniformly at random and then selecting a new position along that axis…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Jonatan Kaare-Rasmussen

In this paper, we study the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for integer least-square (LS) optimization problems. It is found that the mixing time of MCMC for integer LS problems depends on the structure of the underlying…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2012-03-13 Weiyu Xu , Alex Dimakis , Babak Hassibi

For Markov chains and Markov processes exhibiting a form of stochastic monotonicity (larger states shift up transition probabilities in terms of stochastic dominance), stability and ergodicity results can be obtained using order-theoretic…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Takashi Kamihigashi , John Stachurski

Markov chain methods are remarkably successful in computational physics, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization. The cost of such methods often reduces to the mixing time, i.e., the time required to reach the steady state of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-11-15 Davide Orsucci , Hans J. Briegel , Vedran Dunjko

The standard coalescent is widely used in evolutionary biology and population genetics to model the ancestral history of a sample of molecular sequences as a rooted and ranked binary tree. In this paper, we present a representation of the…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-12-16 Mackenzie Simper , Julia A. Palacios

We introduce a unified operator-theoretic framework for analyzing mixing times of finite-state ergodic Markov chains that applies to both reversible and non-reversible dynamics. The central object in our analysis is the projected transition…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-05 Muhammad Abdullah Naeem

We study very simple sorting algorithms based on a probabilistic comparator model. In our model, errors in comparing two elements are due to (1) the energy or effort put in the comparison and (2) the difference between the compared…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-05-16 Barbara Geissmann , Paolo Penna