Related papers: Mixing time bounds via bottleneck sequences

To find the number of assignments of zeros and ones satisfying a specific Knapsack Problem is $\#P$ hard, so only approximations are envisageable. A Markov chain allowing uniform sampling of all possible solutions is given by Luby, Randall…

The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…

Glauber dynamics is a powerful tool to generate randomized, approximate solutions to combinatorially difficult problems. Applications include Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation and distributed scheduling for wireless networks. In…

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.…

In this note, we prove that on any graph of maximal degree $d$ the mixing time of the Glauber Dynamics for the Ising Model at $\beta_c=\tanh^{-1}(\frac1{d-1})$, the uniqueness threshold on the infinite $d$-regular tree, is at most…

We present a Markov chain example where non-reversibility and an added edge jointly improve mixing time: when a random edge is added to a cycle of $n$ vertices and a Markov chain with a drift is introduced, we get mixing time of…

We prove an upper bound of $1.5324 n \log n$ for the mixing time of the random-to-random insertion shuffle, improving on the best known upper bound of $2 n \log n$. Our proof is based on the analysis of a non-Markovian coupling.

We study Markov chains for $\alpha$-orientations of plane graphs, these are orientations where the outdegree of each vertex is prescribed by the value of a given function $\alpha$. The set of $\alpha$-orientations of a plane graph has a…

We consider tilings of a closed region of the Kagome lattice (partition of the plane into regular hexagons and equilateral triangles such that each edge is shared by one triangle and one hexagon). We are interested in the rate of…

We suggest an approach to obtaining general two-sided bounds on the rate of convergence in terms of special "weighted" norms related to total variation. Some important classes of continuous-time Markov chains are considered:…

Consider Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on a graph of $n$ vertices. Hayes and Sinclair showed that the mixing time for this dynamics is at least $n\log n/f(\Delta)$, where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree and $f(\Delta) = \Theta(\Delta…

Through a Metropolis-like algorithm with single step computational cost of order one, we build a Markov chain that relaxes to the canonical Fermi statistics for k non-interacting particles among m energy levels. Uniformly over the…

We give a new rapid mixing result for a natural random walk on the independent sets of a graph $G$. We show that when $G$ has bounded treewidth, this random walk -- known as the Glauber dynamics for the hardcore model -- mixes rapidly for…

We prove a lower bound on the size of bottlenecks in uniform quadrangulations, valid at all scales simultaneously. We use it to establish upper bounds on the uniform mixing time of the lazy random walk on uniform quadrangulations, as well…

We consider combinatorial problems that can be solved in polynomial time for graphs of bounded treewidth but where the order of the polynomial that bounds the running time is expected to depend on the treewidth bound. First we review some…

We study inhomogeneous continuous-time weakly ergodic Markov chains with a finite state space. We introduce the notion of a Markov chain with the regular structure of an infinitesimal matrix and study the sharp upper bounds on the rate of…

We establish bounds on the conductance for the systematic-scan and random-scan Gibbs samplers when the target distribution satisfies a Poincar\'e or log-Sobolev inequality and possesses sufficiently regular conditional distributions. These…

This is an expository paper, focussing on the following scenario. We have two Markov chains, $\mathcal {M}$ and $\mathcal {M}'$. By some means, we have obtained a bound on the mixing time of $\mathcal {M}'$. We wish to compare $\mathcal…

This paper considers non-backtracking random walks on random graphs generated according to the configuration model. The quantity of interest is the scaling of the mixing time of the random walk as the number of vertices of the random graph…

We give the first polynomial upper bound on the mixing time of the edge-flip Markov chain for unbiased dyadic tilings, resolving an open problem originally posed by Janson, Randall, and Spencer in 2002. A dyadic tiling of size n is a tiling…