Related papers: Hitting time, access time and optimal transport on…
We investigate the hitting times of random walks on graphs, where a hitting time is defined as the number of steps required for a random walker to move from one node to another. While much of the existing literature focuses on calculating…
An aperiodic and irreducible Markov chain on a finite state space converges to its stationary distribution. When convergence to equilibrium is measured by total variation distance, there exists an optimal coupling and a maximal coupling…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected time to find a maximum degree node on a graph using a (parameterized) biased random walk. For assortative graphs the positive degree correlation serves as a local gradient for which a bias…
Consider a sequence of continuous-time irreducible reversible Markov chains and a sequence of initial distributions, $\mu_n$. The sequence is said to exhibit $\mu_n$-cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is…
The shortest-path, commute time, and diffusion distances on undirected graphs have been widely employed in applications such as dimensionality reduction, link prediction, and trip planning. Increasingly, there is interest in using…
For random walks on graph $\mathcal{G}$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, the mean hitting time $H_j$ from a vertex chosen from the stationary distribution to vertex $j$ measures the importance for $j$, while the Kemeny constant…
Next to the shortest path distance, the second most popular distance function between vertices in a graph is the commute distance (resistance distance). For two vertices u and v, the hitting time H_{uv} is the expected time it takes a…
In a Markov chain started at a state $x$, the hitting time $\tau(y)$ is the first time that the chain reaches another state $y$. We study the probability $\mathbf{P}_x(\tau(y) = t)$ that the first visit to $y$ occurs precisely at a given…
We consider irreducible Markov chains on a finite state space. We show that the mixing time of any such chain is equivalent to the maximum, over initial states $x$ and moving large sets $(A_s)_s$, of the hitting time of $(A_s)_s$ starting…
Hitting times provide a fundamental measure of distance in random processes, quantifying the expected number of steps for a random walk starting at node $u$ to reach node $v$. They have broad applications across domains such as network…
We have developed a steady state theory of complex transport networks used to model the flow of commodity, information, viruses, opinions, or traffic. Our approach is based on the use of the Markov chains defined on the graph…
The first-passage time (FPT) is the time it takes a system variable to cross a given boundary for the first time. In the context of Markov networks, the FPT is the time a random walker takes to reach a particular node (target) by hopping…
We establish and generalise several bounds for various random walk quantities including the mixing time and the maximum hitting time. Unlike previous analyses, our derivations are based on rather intuitive notions of local expansion…
Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…
We study hitting times in simple random walks on graphs, which measure the time required to reach specific target vertices. Our main result establishes a sharp lower bound for the variance of hitting times. For a simple random walk on a…
The hitting time, h_uv, of a random walk on a finite graph G, is the expected time for the walk to reach vertex v given that it started at vertex u. We present two methods of calculating the hitting time between vertices of finite graphs,…
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…
Consider a discrete time, ergodic Markov chain with finite state space which is started from stationarity. Fill and Lyzinski (2014) showed that, in some cases, the hitting time for a given state may be represented as a sum of a geometric…
We consider random walks in which the walk originates in one set of nodes and then continues until it reaches one or more nodes in a target set. The time required for the walk to reach the target set is of interest in understanding the…
An (upward) skip-free Markov chain with the set of nonnegative integers as state space is a chain for which upward jumps may be only of unit size; there is no restriction on downward jumps. In a 1987 paper, Brown and Shao determined, for an…