Related papers: The switch Markov chain for sampling irregular gra…
Establishing cutoff, an abrupt transition from "not mixed" to "well mixed", is a classical topic in the theory of mixing times for Markov chains. Interest has grown recently in determining not only the existence of cutoff and the order of…
A mixed graph $G$ is a graph that consists of both undirected and directed edges. An orientation of $G$ is formed by orienting all the undirected edges of $G$, i.e., converting each undirected edge $\{u,v\}$ into a directed edge that is…
Considering a Markov chain defined on a cycle, near-quadratic improvement of mixing is shown when only a subtle perturbation is introduced to the structure and non-reversible transition probabilities are used. More precisely, a mixing time…
An edge switch is an operation which makes a local change in a graph while maintaining the degree of every vertex. We introduce a switch move, called a triangle switch, which creates or deletes at least one triangle. Specifically, a make…
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…
In this paper, we outline a model of graph (or network) dynamics based on two ingredients. The first ingredient is a Markov chain on the space of possible graphs. The second ingredient is a semi-Markov counting process of renewal type. The…
We study continuous time Markov processes on graphs. The notion of frequency is introduced, which serves well as a scaling factor between any Markov time of a continuous time Markov process and that of its jump chain. As an application, we…
Canonical paths is one of the most powerful tools available to show that a Markov chain is rapidly mixing, thereby enabling approximate sampling from complex high dimensional distributions. Two success stories for the canonical paths method…
We prove a Chernoff-type bound for sums of matrix-valued random variables sampled via a regular (aperiodic and irreducible) finite Markov chain. Specially, consider a random walk on a regular Markov chain and a Hermitian matrix-valued…
Sampling from learned high-dimensional distributions is a foundational computational problem. We introduce U-turn chains: Markov chains obtained by iterating short forward-backward steps of a diffusion model, in which each step proposes a…
In this paper, we study a class of stochastic processes, called evolving network Markov chains, in evolving networks. Our approach is to transform the degree distribution problem of an evolving network to a corresponding problem of evolving…
We consider the problem of sampling a bipartite graph with given vertex degrees where a set $F$ of edges and non-edges which need to be contained is predefined. Our general result shows that the repeated swap of edges and non-edges in…
Markov chains are fundamental models for stochastic dynamics, with applications in a wide range of areas such as population dynamics, queueing systems, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Estimating the transition matrix and…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Decentralized stochastic gradient method emerges as a promising solution for solving large-scale machine learning problems. This paper studies the decentralized Markov chain gradient descent (DMGD) algorithm - a variant of the decentralized…
In this paper, the question of expected time to convergence is addressed for unbiased quantized consensus on undirected connected graphs, and some strong results are obtained. The paper first provides a tight expression for the expected…
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.…
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 a number of graph exploration problems in the following natural scenario: an algorithm starts exploring an undirected graph from some seed node; the algorithm, for an arbitrary node $v$ that it is aware of, can ask an oracle to…
We propose a Markov chain simulation method to generate simple connected random graphs with a specified degree sequence and level of clustering. The networks generated by our algorithm are random in all other respects and can thus serve as…