Related papers: Optimal stopping time and halting set for total va…

The cutoff phenomenon describes a case where a Markov chain exhibits a sharp transition in its convergence to stationarity. In 1996, Diaconis surveyed this phenomenon, and asked how one could recognize its occurrence in families of finite…

A sequence of Markov chains is said to exhibit (total variation) cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is abrupt. We consider reversible lazy chains. We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the…

Consider a sequence of continuous-time irreducible reversible Markov chains and a sequence of initial distributions, $\mu_n$. The sequence is said to exhibit $\mu_n$-cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is…

We study convergence to equilibrium for a large class of Markov chains in random environment. The chains are sparse in the sense that in every row of the transition matrix $P$ the mass is essentially concentrated on few entries. Moreover,…

This paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of birth and death chains to converge abruptly to stationarity, that is, to present a cut-off. The condition involves the notions of spectral gap and mixing time. Y. Peres…

We consider irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chains on a finite state space. Mixing times and hitting times are fundamental parameters of the chain. We relate them by showing that the mixing time of the lazy chain is equivalent…

Let 0<\alpha<1/2. We show that the mixing time of a continuous-time reversible Markov chain on a finite state space is about as large as the largest expected hitting time of a subset of stationary measure at least \alpha of the state space.…

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…

The cutoff phenomenon describes the case when an abrupt transition occurs in the convergence of a Markov chain to its equilibrium measure. There are various metrics which can be used to measure the distance to equilibrium, each of which…

We survey recent results concerning the total-variation mixing time of the simple exclusion process on the segment (symmetric and asymmetric) and a continuum analog, the simple random walk on the simplex with an emphasis on cutoff results.…

Perfect sampling is a technique that uses coupling arguments to provide a sample from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain in a finite time without ever computing the distribution. This technique is very efficient if all the events…

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…

Given a discrete source distribution $\mu$ and discrete target distribution $\nu$ on a common finite state space $\mathcal{X}$, we are tasked with transporting $\mu$ to $\nu$ using a given discrete-time Markov chain $X$ with the quickest…

For a discrete time Markov chain and in line with Strotz' consistent planning we develop a framework for problems of optimal stopping that are time-inconsistent due to the consideration of a non-linear function of an expected reward. We…

We use coupling to study the time taken until the distribution of a statistic on a Markov chain is close to its stationary distribution. Coupling is a common technique used to obtain upper bounds on mixing times of Markov chains, and we…

The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…

We consider irreducible Markov chains on a finite state space. We show that the mixing time of any such chain is equivalent to the maximum, over initial states $x$ and moving large sets $(A_s)_s$, of the hitting time of $(A_s)_s$ starting…

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…

We investigate the mixing properties of a finite Markov chain in random environment defined as a mixture of a deterministic chain and a chain whose state space has been permuted uniformly at random. This work is the counterpart of a…

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…