Related papers: Assessing significance in a Markov chain without m…
We give qualitative and quantitative improvements to theorems which enable significance testing in Markov Chains, with a particular eye toward the goal of enabling strong, interpretable, and statistically rigorous claims of political…
In this paper, we present a novel iterative Monte Carlo method for approximating the stationary probability of a single state of a positive recurrent Markov chain. We utilize the characterization that the stationary probability of a state…
Random walks are a fundamental model in applied mathematics and are a common example of a Markov chain. The limiting stationary distribution of the Markov chain represents the fraction of the time spent in each state during the stochastic…
The distribution of the "mixing time" or the "time to stationarity" in a discrete time irreducible Markov chain, starting in state i, can be defined as the number of trials to reach a state sampled from the stationary distribution of the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are invaluable tools for exploring stationary properties of physical systems, especially in situations where direct sampling is unfeasible. Common implementations of Monte Carlo algorithms employ…
Motivated by techniques developed in recent progress on lower bounds for sublinear time algorithms (Behnezhad, Roghani and Rubinstein, STOC 2023, FOCS 2023, and STOC 2024) we introduce and study a new class of randomized algorithmic…
We prove that for a random walk on the real line whose increments have zero mean and are either integer-valued or spread out (i.e. the distributions of the steps of the walk are eventually non-singular), the Markov chain of overshoots above…
A switching random walk, commonly known under the misnomer `oscillating random walk', is a real-valued Markov chain whose distribution of increments is determined by the sign of the current position. We explicitly identify an invariant…
The partially asymmetric exclusion process (PASEP) is an important model from statistical mechanics which describes a system of interacting particles hopping left and right on a one-dimensional lattice of N sites. It is partially asymmetric…
We introduce the notion of order of magnitude reversibility (OM-reversibility) in Markov chains that are parametrized by a positive parameter $\ep$. OM-reversibility is a weaker condition than reversibility, and requires only the knowledge…
What can one say on convergence to stationarity of a finite state Markov chain that behaves "locally" like a nearest neighbor random walk on ${\mathbb Z}$ ? The model we consider is a version of nearest neighbor lazy random walk on the…
Approximating the stationary probability of a state in a Markov chain through Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques is, in general, inefficient. Standard random walk approaches require $\tilde{O}(\tau/\pi(v))$ operations to approximate the…
I show how any reversible Markov chain on a finite state space that is irreducible, and hence suitable for estimating expectations with respect to its invariant distribution, can be used to construct a non-reversible Markov chain on a…
In previous work [arXiv:1608.02014], we developed a rigorous statistical test for outlier status in a reversible Markov Chain, and demonstrated its utilization with an application to detecting gerrymandering in Pennsylvania's Congressional…
Verification of infinite-state Markov chains is still a challenge despite several fruitful numerical or statistical approaches. For decisive Markov chains, there is a simple numerical algorithm that frames the reachability probability as…
A random walk is a basic stochastic process on graphs and a key primitive in the design of distributed algorithms. One of the most important features of random walks is that, under mild conditions, they converge to a stationary distribution…
Parametric Markov chains (pMC) are used to model probabilistic systems with unknown or partially known probabilities. Although (universal) pMC verification for reachability properties is known to be coETR-complete, there have been efforts…
We study an irreducible Markov chain on the category of finite abelian $p$-groups, whose stationary measure is the Cohen-Lenstra distribution. This Markov chain arises when one studies the cokernel of a random matrix $M$, after conditioning…
We consider the problem of estimating the asymptotic variance of a function defined on a Markov chain, an important step for statistical inference of the stationary mean. We design a novel recursive estimator that requires $O(1)$…
Nonparametric identification and maximum likelihood estimation for finite-state hidden Markov models are investigated. We obtain identification of the parameters as well as the order of the Markov chain if the transition probability…