Related papers: Shepherding Hordes of Markov Chains

The problem of sampling constrained continuous distributions has frequently appeared in many machine/statistical learning models. Many Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling methods have been adapted to handle different types of…

We introduce the notion of quantum Markov decision process (qMDP) as a semantic model of nondeterministic and concurrent quantum programs. It is shown by examples that qMDPs can be used in analysis of quantum algorithms and protocols. We…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) aim to handle changing or partially known system dynamics. To solve them, one typically resorts to robust optimization methods. However, this significantly increases computational complexity and…

We introduce block Markov chains (BMCs) indexed by an infinite rooted tree. It turns out that BMCs define a new class of tree-indexed Markovian processes. We clarify the structure of BMCs in connection with Markov chains (MCs) and Markov…

We aim at characterizing viability, invariance and some reachability properties of controlled piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs). Using analytical methods from the theory of viscosity solutions, we establish criteria for…

The embedding problem of Markov transition matrices into continuous-time Markov semigroups is a classic problem that regained a lot of impetus and activities in recent years. We consider it here for the following generalisation of the…

We study the Bipartite Boolean Quadratic Programming Problem (BBQP) which is an extension of the well known Boolean Quadratic Programming Problem (BQP). Applications of the BBQP include mining discrete patterns from binary data,…

Unambiguous automata are nondeterministic automata in which every word has at most one accepting run. In this paper we give a polynomial-time algorithm for model checking discrete-time Markov chains against \omega-regular specifications…

Markov decision processes model systems subject to nondeterministic and probabilistic uncertainty. A plethora of verification techniques addresses variations of reachability properties, such as: Is there a scheduler resolving the…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a canonical model to reason about decision making within a stochastic environment. We study a fundamental class of infinite MDPs: one-counter MDPs (OC-MDPs). They extend finite MDPs via an associated…

Scientific explanation often requires inferring maximally predictive features from a given data set. Unfortunately, the collection of minimal maximally predictive features for most stochastic processes is uncountably infinite. In such…

We consider the verification of multiple expected reward objectives at once on Markov decision processes (MDPs). This enables a trade-off analysis among multiple objectives by obtaining the Pareto front. We focus on strategies that are easy…

Finding the model that best describes a high-dimensional dataset is a daunting task, even more so if one aims to consider all possible high-order patterns of the data, going beyond pairwise models. For binary data, we show that this task…

This paper studies three kinds of long-term behaviours, namely reachability, repeated reachability and persistence, of quantum Markov chains (qMCs). As a stepping-stone, we introduce the notion of bottom strongly connected component (BSCC)…

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 formulate some simple conditions under which a Markov chain may be approximated by the solution to a differential equation, with quantifiable error probabilities. The role of a choice of coordinate functions for the Markov chain is…

The analysis of parametrised systems is a growing field in verification, but the analysis of parametrised probabilistic systems is still in its infancy. This is partly because it is much harder: while there are beautiful cut-off results for…

We consider conditional tests for non-negative discrete exponential families. We develop two Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which allow us to sample from the conditional space and to perform approximated tests. The first…

Metropolis-Hastings (MH) is a foundational Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to formulate and analyse MH in terms of categorical probability, using a recent involutive framework for…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…