Related papers: A technical report on hitting times, mixing and cu…
Since 1997 a considerable effort has been spent to study the mixing time of switch Markov chains on the realizations of graphic degree sequences of simple graphs. Several results were proved on rapidly mixing Markov chains on unconstrained,…
The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of an ergodic finite Markov chain to equilibrium. Of particular interest is understanding this convergence for the simple random walk on a bounded-degree expander graph.…
In this paper we analyze a single server queue with batch arrivals and semi-Markovian service times. We also include the feature that the first service of each busy period might have a different distribution than subsequent service times.…
In this paper, we extend hitting times for imprecise Markov chains to the framework of weighted imprecise Markov chains (WIMCs), in which each transition is associated with a strictly positive weight encoded by a matrix $W$. Given a convex…
Suppose that we are given a time series where consecutive samples are believed to come from a probabilistic source, that the source changes from time to time and that the total number of sources is fixed. Our objective is to estimate the…
Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…
We present a novel approach to quantizing Markov chains. The approach is based on the Markov chain coupling method, which is frequently used to prove fast mixing. Given a particular coupling, e.g., a grand coupling, we construct a…
We consider a dynamic random graph on $n$ vertices that is obtained by starting from a random graph generated according to the configuration model with a prescribed degree sequence and at each unit of time randomly rewiring a fraction…
We study quasi-stationary distributions and quasi-limiting behavior of Markov chains in general reducible state spaces with absorption. We propose a set of assumptions dealing with particular situations where the state space can be…
Families of symmetric simple random walks on Cayley graphs of Abelian groups with a bound on the number of generators are shown to never have sharp cut off in the sense of [1], [3], or [5]. Here convergence to the stationary distribution is…
We study a large class of reversible Markov chains with discrete state space and transition matrix $P_N$. We define the notion of a set of {\it metastable points} as a subset of the state space $\G_N$ such that (i) this set is reached from…
A class of examples is constructed to show that for strictly stationary Markov chains that are reversible, the simultaneous mixing rates for the $\rho$-mixing and strong mixing ($\alpha$-mixing) conditions can be fairly arbitrary, within…
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…
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…
We investigate the convergence to (quasi--)equilibrium of a density dependent Markov chain in~${\mathbb Z}^d$, whose drift satisfies a system of ordinary differential equations having an attractive fixed point. For a sequence of such…
A well-known theorem for an irreducible skip-free chain with absorbing state $d$, under some conditions, is that the hitting (absorbing) time of state $d$ starting from state 0 is distributed as the sum of $d$ independent geometric (or…
We consider a class of discrete time Markov chains with state space [0,1] and the following dynamics. At each time step, first the direction of the next transition is chosen at random with probability depending on the current location. Then…
The cutoff phenomenon for an ergodic Markov chain describes a sharp transition in the convergence to its stationary distribution, over a negligible period of time, known as cutoff window. We study the cutoff phenomenon for simple random…
Markov chains are one of the well-known tools for modeling and analyzing stochastic systems. At the same time, they are used for constructing random walks that can achieve a given stationary distribution. This paper is concerned with…
We consider the biased card shuffling and the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (ASEP) on the segment. We obtain the asymptotic of their mixing times: our result show that these two continuous-time Markov chains display cutoff. Our…