Related papers: Minimax Testing of Identity to a Reference Ergodic…
We consider whether ergodic Markov chains with bounded step size remain bounded in probability when their transitions are modified by an adversary on a bounded subset. We provide counterexamples to show that the answer is no in general, and…
We describe an exact test of the null hypothesis that a Markov chain is nth order versus the alternate hypothesis that it is $(n+1)$-th order. The procedure does not rely on asymptotic properties, but instead builds up the test statistic…
We study the limit behaviour of a generally non-linear ordinary differential equation whose solution is a superadditive generalisation of a stochastic matrix, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for this solution to be ergodic,…
We obtain a perfect sampling characterization of weak ergodicity for backward products of finite stochastic matrices, and equivalently, simultaneous tail triviality of the corresponding nonhomogeneous Markov chains. Applying these ideas to…
In many modern applications, difficulty in evaluating the posterior density makes performing even a single MCMC step slow. This difficulty can be caused by intractable likelihood functions, but also appears for routine problems with large…
We establish the weak large deviations principle for empirical measures of Markov chains on $\mathbb R^d$ under mild assumptions. In particular, no irreducibility is assumed and the initial measure may be arbitrary. The proof is entirely…
We study the problem of clustering $T$ trajectories of length $H$, each generated by one of K unknown ergodic Markov chains over a finite state space of size $S$. We derive an instance-dependent, high-probability lower bound on the…
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…
A finite ergodic Markov chain exhibits cutoff if its distance to equilibrium remains close to its initial value over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Originally discovered in the…
This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
Testing between hypotheses, when independent sampling is possible, is a well developed subject. In this paper, we propose hypothesis tests that are applicable when the samples are obtained using Markov chain Monte Carlo. These tests are…
This paper presents a simple algorithm to check whether reachability probabilities in parametric Markov chains are monotonic in (some of) the parameters. The idea is to construct - only using the graph structure of the Markov chain and…
We study the problem of hypothesis testing between two discrete distributions, where we only have access to samples after the action of a known reversible Markov chain, playing the role of noise. We derive instance-dependent minimax rates…
We use the $f-divergence$ also called relative entropy as a measure of diversity between probability densities and review its basic properties. In the sequence we define a few objects which capture relevant information from the sample of a…
We present a new algorithm for the statistical model checking of Markov chains with respect to unbounded temporal properties, such as reachability and full linear temporal logic. The main idea is that we monitor each simulation run on the…
We analyse the structure of imprecise Markov chains and study their convergence by means of accessibility relations. We first identify the sets of states, so-called minimal permanent classes, that are the minimal sets capable of containing…
Reversibility is a key property of Markov chains, central to algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings and other MCMC methods. Yet many applications yield non-reversible chains, motivating the problem of approximating them by reversible ones…
To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…
This paper is a survey of various proofs of the so called {\em fundamental theorem of Markov chains}: every ergodic Markov chain has a unique positive stationary distribution and the chain attains this distribution in the limit independent…
This paper provides sufficient conditions over the sequence of samples and parameters of an adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to ensure ergodicity with respect to a target distribution that can have unbounded support. These…