Related papers: Mixing time estimation in reversible Markov chains…
A discrete-time Markov chain can be transformed into a new Markov chain by looking at its states along iterations of an almost surely finite stopping time. By the optional stopping theorem, any bounded harmonic function with respect to the…
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…
The paper studies an improved estimate for the rate of convergence for nonlinear homogeneous discrete-time Markov chains. These processes are nonlinear in terms of the distribution law. Hence, the transition kernels are dependent on the…
We consider a Markov chain $(M_{n})_{n\ge 0}$ on the set $\mathbb{N}_{0}$ of nonnegative integers which is eventually decreasing, i.e. $\mathbb{P}\{M_{n+1}<M_{n}|M_{n}\ge a\}=1$ for some $a\in\mathbb{N}$ and all $n\ge 0$. We are interested…
We prove that any Markov chain that performs local, reversible updates on randomly chosen vertices of a bounded-degree graph necessarily has mixing time at least $\Omega(n\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. Our bound applies to…
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…
Using elementary methods, we prove that for a countable Markov chain $P$ of ergodic degree $d > 0$ the rate of convergence towards the stationary distribution is subgeometric of order $n^{-d}$, provided the initial distribution satisfies…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the…
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,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo(MCMC) is a popular approach to sample from high dimensional distributions, and the asymptotic variance is a commonly used criterion to evaluate the performance. While most popular MCMC algorithms are reversible,…
We derive an approximate but explicit formula for the Mean First Passage Time of a random walker between a source and a target node of a directed and weighted network. The formula does not require any matrix inversion, and it takes as only…
We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…
Let X={X_n:n=0,1,2,...} be an irreducible, positive recurrent Markov chain with invariant probability measure \pi. We show that if X satisfies a one-step minorization condition, then \pi can be represented as an infinite mixture. The…
Imprecise continuous-time Markov chains are a robust type of continuous-time Markov chains that allow for partially specified time-dependent parameters. Computing inferences for them requires the solution of a non-linear differential…
In the paper, we study a new rate of convergence estimate for homogeneous discrete-time nonlinear Markov chains based on the Markov-Dobrushin condition. This result generalizes the convergence estimates for any positive number of transition…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are central in computational statistics, and typically rely on detailed balance to ensure invariance with respect to a target distribution. Although straightforward to construct by Metropolization, this can…
We derive general bounds on the probability that the empirical first-passage time $\overline{\tau}_n\equiv \sum_{i=1}^n\tau_i/n$ of a reversible ergodic Markov process inferred from a sample of $n$ independent realizations deviates from the…
A family $\{Q_{\beta}\}_{\beta \geq 0}$ of Markov chains is said to exhibit $\textit{metastable mixing}$ with $\textit{modes}$ $S_{\beta}^{(1)},\ldots,S_{\beta}^{(k)}$ if its spectral gap (or some other mixing property) is very close to the…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of(undirected) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the sampling. The…