Related papers: Coupling for features of random walks

In [4], we examined the use of coupling to obtain bounds on the mixing time of statistics on Markov chains. In the present paper, we consider the same general problem, but using strong stationary times rather than coupling. We discuss…

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…

Couplings play a central role in contemporary Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and in the analysis of their convergence to stationarity. In most cases, a coupling must induce relatively fast meeting between chains to ensure good…

Coupling is a widely used technique in the theoretical study of interacting stochastic processes. In this paper I present an example demonstrating its usefulness also in the efficient computer simulation of such processes. I first describe…

We present a novel approach to quantizing Markov chains. The approach is based on the Markov chain coupling method, which is frequently used to prove fast mixing. Given a particular coupling, e.g., a grand coupling, we construct a…

We survey existing techniques to bound the mixing time of Markov chains. The mixing time is related to a geometric parameter called conductance which is a measure of edge-expansion. Bounds on conductance are typically obtained by a…

We apply coupling techniques in order to prove that the transfer operators associated with random topological Markov chains and non-stationary shift spaces with the big images and preimages-property have a spectral gap.

This review paper provides an introduction of Markov chains and their convergence rates which is an important and interesting mathematical topic which also has important applications for very widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…

Mixing of finite time-homogeneous Markov chains is well understood nowadays, with a rich set of techniques to estimate their mixing time. In this paper, we study the mixing time of random walks in dynamic random environments. To that end,…

We show that Markov couplings can be used to improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo calculations in some situations where the steady-state probability distribution is not explicitly known. The technique generalizes the notion of…

What can one say on convergence to stationarity of a finite state Markov chain that behaves "locally" like a nearest neighbor random walk on ${\mathbb Z}$ ? The model we consider is a version of nearest neighbor lazy random walk on the…

This paper presents a self-contained account for coupling arguments and applications in the context of Markov processes. We first use coupling to describe the transport problem, which leads to the concepts of optimal coupling and…

This paper explores the mixing time of the random transposition walk on the symmetric group. While it has long been known that this walk mixes in order n*log(n) time, this result has not previously been attained using coupling. A coupling…

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 uniformly generating a spanning tree, of a connected undirected graph. This process is useful to compute statistics, namely for phylogenetic trees. We describe a Markov chain for producing these trees. For cycle…

Given a sequence $(\mathfrak{X}_i, \mathscr{K}_i)_{i=1}^\infty$ of Markov chains, the cut-off phenomenon describes a period of transition to stationarity which is asymptotically lower order than the mixing time. We study mixing times and…

We obtain moment and Gaussian bounds for general Lipschitz functions evaluated along the sample path of a Markov chain. We treat Markov chains on general (possibly unbounded) state spaces via a coupling method. If the first moment of the…

We show how to combine Fourier analysis with coupling arguments to bound the mixing times of a variety of Markov chains. The mixing time is the number of steps a Markov chain takes to approach its equilibrium distribution. One application…

A $k$-height on a graph $G=(V, E)$ is an assignment $V\to\{0, \ldots, k\}$ such that the value on ajacent vertices differs by at most $1$. We study the Markov chain on $k$-heights that in each step selects a vertex at random, and, if…