Related papers: Optimal stopping time and halting set for total va…
It is well known that the distributions of hitting times in Markov chains are quite irregular, unless the limit as time tends to infinity is considered. We show that nevertheless for a typical finite irreducible Markov chain and for…
We make a connection between the continuous time and lazy discrete time Markov chains through the comparison of cutoffs and mixing time in total variation distance. For illustration, we consider finite birth and death chains and provide a…
We describe the solution of an optimal stopping problem for a stable L\'evy process killed at state-dependent rate, which can be seen as a model for bankruptcy. The killing rate is chosen in such a way that the killed process remains…
Given an irreducible discrete-time Markov chain on a finite state space, we consider the largest expected hitting time $T(\alpha)$ of a set of stationary measure at least $\alpha$ for $\alpha\in(0,1)$. We obtain tight inequalities among the…
In this article, we consider products of ergodic Markov chains and discuss their cutoffs in the total variation. Through a new inequality relating the total variation and the Hellinger distance, we may identify the total variation cutoffs…
Consider a discrete time, ergodic Markov chain with finite state space which is started from stationarity. Fill and Lyzinski (2014) showed that, in some cases, the hitting time for a given state may be represented as a sum of a geometric…
We study the convergence rate to stationarity for a class of exchangeable partition-valued Markov chains called cut-and-paste chains. The law governing the transitions of a cut-and-paste chain are determined by products of i.i.d. stochastic…
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…
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…
In [4], we examined the use of coupling to obtain bounds on the mixing time of statistics on Markov chains. In the present paper, we consider the same general problem, but using strong stationary times rather than coupling. We discuss…
In this paper we consider stopping problems for continuous-time Markov chains under a general risk-sensitive optimization criterion for problems with finite and infinite time horizon. More precisely our aim is to maximize the certainty…
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…
This paper deals with the optimal stopping problem under partial observation for piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. We first obtain a recursive formulation of the optimal filter process and derive the dynamic programming equation of…
An (upward) skip-free Markov chain with the set of nonnegative integers as state space is a chain for which upward jumps may be only of unit size; there is no restriction on downward jumps. In a 1987 paper, Brown and Shao determined, for an…
The convergence rate of a Markov chain to its stationary distribution is typically assessed using the concept of total variation mixing time. However, this worst-case measure often yields pessimistic estimates and is challenging to infer…
We study irreducible time-homogenous Markov chains with finite state space in discrete time. We obtain results on the sensitivity of the stationary distribution and other statistical quantities with respect to perturbations of the…
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 finite irreducible Markov chains. It was shown that mean hitting time from one state to another satisfies the triangle inequality. Hence, sum of mean hitting time between couple of states in both directions is a metric on the…
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…
Markov chains have long been used for generating random variates from spatial point processes. Broadly speaking, these chains fall into two categories: Metropolis-Hastings type chains running in discrete time and spatial birth-death chains…