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Related papers: Why is Kemeny's constant a constant?

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Kemeny constant, defined as the expected hitting time of random walks from a source node to a randomly chosen target node, is a fundamental metric in graph data management with many real-world applications. However, computing it exactly on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Cheng Li , Meihao Liao , Rong-Hua Li , Guoren Wang

Discussion of the constancy, or otherwise, of the various so-called universal constants which abound in physics has continued for many years. However, relatively recent observations, which appear to indicate a variation in the value of the…

General Physics · Physics 2007-08-21 A. D. Law , J. Dunning-Davies

In this work, we characterise the statistics of Markov chains by constructing an associated sequence of periodic differential operators. Studying the density of states of these operators reveals the absolutely continuous invariant measure…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-09-22 Bryn Davies , Angelica Yu Xiao

In a connected graph, Kemeny's constant gives the expected time of a random walk from an arbitrary vertex $x$ to reach a randomly-chosen vertex $y$. Because of this, Kemeny's constant can be interpreted as a measure of how well a graph is…

We find closed form formulas for Kemeny's constant and its relationship with two Kirchhoffian indices for some composite graphs that use as basic building block a graph endowed with one of several symmetry properties.

Probability · Mathematics 2020-07-23 Jose Palacios , Greg Markowsky

Decisiveness of infinite Markov chains with respect to some (finite or infinite) target set of states is a key property that allows to compute the reachability probability of this set up to an arbitrary precision. Most of the existing works…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Alain Finkel , Serge Haddad , Lina Ye

In any Markov chain with finite state space the distribution of transition records always belongs to the exponential family. This observation is used to prove a fluctuation theorem, and to show that the dynamical entropy of a stationary…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-11 Jan Naudts , Erik Van der Straeten

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-08-29 Justin Salez

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Vladislav Vysotsky

There is a well-established theory linking certain semi-Markov chains and continuous-time random walks to time-fractional equations and anomalous diffusion. In this work, we go beyond the semi-Markov framework by considering some…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Lorenzo Facciaroni , Costantino Ricciuti , Enrico Scalas

The focus of this article is on entropy and Markov processes. We study the properties of functionals which are invariant with respect to monotonic transformations and analyze two invariant "additivity" properties: (i) existence of a…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-11-12 A. N. Gorban , P. A. Gorban , G. Judge

In this paper, we determine a formula for Kemeny's constant for a graph with multiple bridges, in terms of quantities that are inherent to the subgraphs obtained upon removal of all bridges and that can be computed independently. With the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-05-18 Jane Breen , Emanuele Crisostomi , Sooyeong Kim

Starting from a Markov chain with a finite alphabet, we consider the chain obtained when all but one symbol are undistinguishable for the practitioner. We study necessary and sufficient conditions for this chain to have continuous…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-09-23 Walter A. F. de Carvalho , Sandro Gallo , Nancy L. Garcia

We consider a discrete time hidden Markov model where the signal is a stationary Markov chain. When conditioned on the observations, the signal is a Markov chain in a random environment under the conditional measure. It is shown that this…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-24 Ramon van Handel

When the initial and transition probabilities of a finite Markov chain in discrete time are not well known, we should perform a sensitivity analysis. This can be done by considering as basic uncertainty models the so-called credal sets that…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-11-24 Gert de Cooman , Filip Hermans , Erik Quaeghebeur

We study the problem of enumerating Braess edges for Kemeny's constant in trees. We obtain bounds and asympotic results for the number of Braess edges in some families of trees.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-09-07 Jihyeug Jang , Mark Kempton , Sooyeong Kim , Adam Knudson , Neal Madras , Minho Song

For many Markov chains of practical interest, the invariant distribution is extremely sensitive to perturbations of some entries of the transition matrix, but insensitive to others; we give an example of such a chain, motivated by a problem…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-10-12 Erik Thiede , Brian Van Koten , Jonathan Weare

In this paper, we are interested in investigating the perturbation bounds for the stationary distributions for discrete-time or continuous-time Markov chains on a countable state space. For discrete-time Markov chains, two new norm-wise…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-08-27 Yuanyuan Liu

Random dynamical systems with countably many maps which admit countable Markov partitions on complete metric spaces such that the resulting Markov systems are uniformly continuous and contractive are considered. A non-degeneracy and a…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2014-11-18 Ivan Werner

The steady states of dynamical processes can exhibit stable nontrivial phases, which can also serve as fault-tolerant classical or quantum memories. For Markovian quantum (classical) dynamics, these steady states are extremal eigenvectors…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-02-13 Tibor Rakovszky , Sarang Gopalakrishnan , Curt von Keyserlingk