Related papers: Cutoff for conjugacy-invariant random walks on the…

This paper explores the mixing time of the random transposition walk on permutations with one-sided interval restrictions. In particular, we're interested in the notion of cutoff, a phenomenon which occurs when mixing occurs in a window of…

We prove asymptotic equivalents for finite-level representations of symmetric groups, that is, for Young diagrams having all but finitely many boxes on their first row. We deduce that random walks on symmetric groups generated by conjugacy…

This paper explores the mixing time of the random transposition walk on the symmetric group. While it has long been known that this walk mixes in order n*log(n) time, this result has not previously been attained using coupling. A coupling…

Our work is motivated by Bourque and Pevzner's (2002) simulation study of the effectiveness of the parsimony method in studying genome rearrangement, and leads to a surprising result about the random transposition walk on the group of…

Consider the random walk on the permutation group obtained when the step distribution is uniform on a given conjugacy class. It is shown that there is a critical time at which two phase transitions occur simultaneously. On the one hand, the…

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…

Given a sequence $(\mathfrak{X}_i, \mathscr{K}_i)_{i=1}^\infty$ of Markov chains, the cut-off phenomenon describes a period of transition to stationarity which is asymptotically lower order than the mixing time. We study mixing times and…

We establish bounds on the mixing times of conjugacy-invariant random walks on finite nilpotent groups in terms of the mixing times of their projections onto the abelianization. This comparison framework shows that, in several natural cases…

We study the random walk on the symmetric group $S_n$ generated by the conjugacy class of cycles of length $k$. We show that the convergence to uniform measure of this walk has a cut-off in total variation distance after $\frac{n}{k} log n$…

We give refined estimates for the discrete time and continuous time versions of some basic random walks on the symmetric and alternating groups $S_n$ and $A_n$. We consider the following models: random transposition, transpose top with…

We study an approximation by time-discretized geodesic random walks of a diffusion process associated with a family of time-dependent metrics on manifolds. The condition we assume on the metrics is a natural time-inhomogeneous extension of…

We study the mixing time of random walks on small-world networks modelled as follows: starting with the 2-dimensional periodic grid, each pair of vertices $\{u,v\}$ with distance $d>1$ is added as a "long-range" edge with probability…

The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of a family of ergodic finite Markov chains to equilibrium. Many natural families of chains are believed to exhibit cutoff, and yet establishing this fact is often…

We introduce a Markov chain for sampling from the uniform distribution on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$, which we call the $\textit{geodesic walk}$. We prove that the mixing time of this walk on any manifold with positive sectional…

We analyse a random walk on the ring of integers mod $n$, which at each time point can make an additive `step' or a multiplicative `jump'. When the probability of making a jump tends to zero as an appropriate power of $n$ we prove the…

We find the total variation mixing time of the interchange process on the dumbbell graph (two complete graphs, $K_n$ and $K_m$, connected by a single edge), and show that this sequence of chains exhibits the cutoff phenomenon precisely when…

We consider a random walk on the hyperoctahedral group $B_n$ generated by the signed permutations of the forms $(i,n)$ and $(-i,n)$ for $1\leq i\leq n$. We call this the flip-transpose top with random shuffle on $B_n$. We find the spectrum…

Establishing cutoff, an abrupt transition from "not mixed" to "well mixed", is a classical topic in the theory of mixing times for Markov chains. Interest has grown recently in determining not only the existence of cutoff and the order of…

Consider shuffling a deck of $n$ cards, labeled $1$ through $n$, as follows: at each time step, pick one card uniformly with your right hand and another card, independently and uniformly with your left hand; then swap the cards. How long…

We present an overview of the representation theoretic techniques used to study the mixing times of random walks on finite groups. We focus on the card shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani in the 1980s and a recent improvement on…