Related papers: Computing cutoff times of birth and death chains

A birth-death chain is a discrete-time Markov chain on the integers whose transition probabilities $p_{i,j}$ are non-zero if and only if $|i-j|=1$. We consider birth-death chains whose birth probabilities $p_{i,i+1}$ form a periodic…

We study the time that the simple exclusion process on the complete graph needs to reach equilibrium in terms of total variation distance. For the graph with n vertices and 1<<k<n/2 particles we show that the mixing time is of order…

A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the context of card…

Let $(X_t)_{t = 0 }^{\infty}$ be an irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chain on a finite state space $\Omega $. Denote its transition matrix by $P$. To avoid periodicity issues (and thus ensuring convergence to equilibrium) one…

Markov chains are convenient means of generating realizations of networks with a given (joint or otherwise) degree distribution, since they simply require a procedure for rewiring edges. The major challenge is to find the right number of…

We consider the random walk on the hypercube which moves by picking an ordered pair $(i,j)$ of distinct coordinates uniformly at random and adding the bit at location $i$ to the bit at location $j$, modulo $2$. We show that this Markov…

Birth-death processes take place ubiquitously throughout the universe. In general, birth and death rates depend on the system size (corresponding to the number of products or customers undergoing the birth-death process) and thus vary every…

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…

The explicit criteria for several types of ergodicity of one-dimensional diffusions or birth-death processes have been found out recently in a surprisingly short period. One of the criteria is for exponential ergodicity of birth-death…

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…

An elementary proof is given for a theorem showing that certain birth-death chains show martingale-like behavior at large stopping times. This is a generalization of and new proof for a theorem from a earlier paper by the author.

We consider the zero-range process with arbitrary bounded monotone rates on the complete graph, in the regime where the number of sites diverges while the density of particles per site converges. We determine the asymptotics of the mixing…

We consider the reversible exclusion process with reservoirs on arbitrary networks. We characterize the spectral gap, mixing time, and mixing window of the process, in terms of certain simple statistics of the underlying network. Among…

We study the Markov chain $x_{n+1}=ax_n+b_n$ on a finite field $\mathbb{F}_p$, where $a \in \mathbb{F}_p$ is fixed and $b_n$ are independent and identically distributed random variables in $\mathbb{F}_p$. Conditionally on the Riemann…

We link two phenomena concerning the asymptotical behavior of stochastic processes: (i) abrupt convergence or cut-off phenomenon, and (ii) the escape behavior usually associated to exit from metastability. The former is characterized by…

We consider an $n$-tuple of independent ergodic Markov processes, each of which converges (in the sense of separation distance) at an exponential rate, and obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the $n$-tuple to exhibit a…

We introduce fruit-inosculated-tree Markov chains. These chains have easily tunable parameters and are a good source of examples. In particular, we prove that every cutoff profile is possible, with any cutoff time and window size.

The fractional birth and the fractional death processes are more desirable in practice than their classical counterparts as they naturally provide greater flexibility in modeling growing and decreasing systems. In this paper, we propose…

The theory of the tight span, a cell complex that can be associated to every metric $D$, offers a unifying view on existing approaches for analyzing distance data, in particular for decomposing a metric $D$ into a sum of simpler metrics as…

We prove a general theorem on cutoffs for symmetric simple exclusion processes on graphs with open boundaries, under the natural assumption that the graphs converge geometrically and spectrally to a compact metric measure space with…