Related papers: Making Markov chains less lazy
Empirical likelihood is a powerful semi-parametric method increasingly investigated in the literature. However, most authors essentially focus on an i.i.d. setting. In the case of dependent data, the classical empirical likelihood method…
The distribution of the "mixing time" or the "time to stationarity" in a discrete time irreducible Markov chain, starting in state i, can be defined as the number of trials to reach a state sampled from the stationary distribution of the…
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 study the convergence rate to stationarity for a class of exchangeable partition-valued Markov chains called cut-and-paste chains. The law governing the transitions of a cut-and-paste chain are determined by products of i.i.d. stochastic…
We study Markov chains for $\alpha$-orientations of plane graphs, these are orientations where the outdegree of each vertex is prescribed by the value of a given function $\alpha$. The set of $\alpha$-orientations of a plane graph has a…
This article shows how coupled Markov chains that meet exactly after a random number of iterations can be used to generate unbiased estimators of the solutions of the Poisson equation. Through this connection, we re-derive known unbiased…
We consider irreversible Markov chains on finite commutative rings randomly generated using both addition and multiplication. We restrict ourselves to the case where the addition is uniformly random and multiplication is arbitrary. We first…
We consider whether ergodic Markov chains with bounded step size remain bounded in probability when their transitions are modified by an adversary on a bounded subset. We provide counterexamples to show that the answer is no in general, and…
We exhibit an efficient procedure for testing, based on a single long state sequence, whether an unknown Markov chain is identical to or $\varepsilon$-far from a given reference chain. We obtain nearly matching (up to logarithmic factors)…
We obtain universal estimates on the convergence to equilibrium and the times of coupling for continuous time irreducible reversible finite-state Markov chains, both in the total variation and in the L^2 norms. The estimates in total…
Reversibility is a key property of Markov chains, central to algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings and other MCMC methods. Yet many applications yield non-reversible chains, motivating the problem of approximating them by reversible ones…
Consider an ergodic Markov chain on a countable state space for which the return times have exponential tails. We show that the stationary version of any such chain is a finitary factor of an i.i.d. process. A key step is to show that any…
We consider the computational task of sampling a bit string $x$ from a distribution $\pi(x)=|\langle x|\psi\rangle|^2$, where $\psi$ is the unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian $H$. Our main result describes a direct link between the…
Given an infinitesimal perturbation of a discrete-time finite Markov chain, we seek the states that are stable despite the perturbation, \textit{i.e.} the states whose weights in the stationary distributions can be bounded away from $0$ as…
We estimate the mixing time of the a nonreversible finite Markov chain called Repeated Balls-into-Bins (RBB) process. This process is a discrete time conservative interacting particle system with parallel updates. Place initially in $L$…
We establish a simple variance inequality for U-statistics whose underlying sequence of random variables is an ergodic Markov Chain. The constants in this inequality are explicit and depend on computable bounds on the mixing rate of the…
We establish the weak large deviations principle for empirical measures of Markov chains on $\mathbb R^d$ under mild assumptions. In particular, no irreducibility is assumed and the initial measure may be arbitrary. The proof is entirely…
The partial sum of the states of a Markov chain or more generally a Markov source is asymptotically normally distributed under suitable conditions. One of these conditions is that the variance is unbounded. A simple combinatorial…
Bailey showed that the general pointwise forecasting for stationary and ergodic time series has a negative solution. However, it is known that for Markov chains the problem can be solved. Morvai showed that there is a stopping time sequence…
Dealing with finite Markov chains in discrete time, the focus often lies on convergence behavior and one tries to make different copies of the chain meet as fast as possible and then stick together. There is, however, a very peculiar kind…