Related papers: Stationary and Transition Probabilities in Slow Mi…
In this paper, we study the problem of inferring time-varying Markov random fields (MRF), where the underlying graphical model is both sparse and changes sparsely over time. Most of the existing methods for the inference of time-varying…
The main goal of this paper is to develop an estimate for the entropy of random stationary ergodic symbolic sequences with elements belonging to a finite alphabet. We present here the detailed analytical study of the entropy for the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
We consider the smoothing probabilities of hidden Markov model (HMM). We show that under fairly general conditions for HMM, the exponential forgetting still holds, and the smoothing probabilities can be well approximated with the ones of…
In a wide range of applications, the stochastic properties of the observed time series change over time. The changes often occur gradually rather than abruptly: the properties are (approximately) constant for some time and then slowly start…
We present an algorithm for learning mixtures of Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) from short unlabeled trajectories. Specifically, our method handles mixtures of Markov chains with optional control input by going through a…
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…
A classical problem for Markov chains is determining their stationary (or steady-state) distribution. This problem has an equally classical solution based on eigenvectors and linear equation systems. However, this approach does not scale to…
We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…
We study the problem of sequentially testing whether a given stochastic process is generated by a known Markov chain. Formally, given access to a stream of random variables, we want to quickly determine whether this sequence is a trajectory…
With the increasing ubiquity of safety-critical autonomous systems operating in uncertain environments, there is a need for mathematical methods for formal verification of stochastic models. Towards formally verifying properties of…
Ergodic properties and asymptotic stationarity are investigated in this paper for the pseudo-covariance matrix (PCM) of a recursive state estimator which is robust against parametric uncertainties and is based on plant output measurements…
Sampling from the conditional (or posterior) probability distribution of the latent states of a Hidden Markov Model, given the realization of the observed process, is a non-trivial problem in the context of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. To do…
We study conservative particle systems on W^S, where S is countable and W = {0, ..., N} or the natural numbers. The rate of a particle moving from site x to site y is given by p(x,y) b(eta_x, eta_y), where eta_z is the number of particles…
In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…
We consider Markov chains on general state spaces in stationary random environment which are defined by a random mapping that is contractive up to a bounded perturbation. We prove their convergence to a limiting law, providing convergence…
Markov models are often used to capture the temporal patterns of sequential data for statistical learning applications. While the Hidden Markov modeling-based learning mechanisms are well studied in literature, we analyze a…
Recursive stochastic algorithms have gained significant attention in the recent past due to data driven applications. Examples include stochastic gradient descent for solving large-scale optimization problems and empirical dynamic…
In this paper, we consider semi-Markov processes whose transition times and transition probabilities depend on a small parameter $\varepsilon$. Understanding the asymptotic behavior of such processes is needed in order to study the…
We consider the problem of bounding mean first passage times for a class of continuous-time Markov chains that captures stochastic interactions between groups of identical agents. The quantitative analysis of such probabilistic population…