Related papers: Drift, Minorization, and Hitting Times
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)…
Over the last three decades, there has been a considerable effort within the applied probability community to develop techniques for bounding the convergence rates of general state space Markov chains. Most of these results assume the…
The convergence, convergence rate and expected hitting time play fundamental roles in the analysis of randomised search heuristics. This paper presents a unified Markov chain approach to studying them. Using the approach, the sufficient and…
We consider Gibbs and block Gibbs samplers for a Bayesian hierarchical version of the one-way random effects model. Drift and minorization conditions are established for the underlying Markov chains. The drift and minorization are used in…
Let $(X_t)$ be a discrete time Markov chain on a general state space. It is well-known that if $(X_t)$ is aperiodic and satisfies a drift and minorization condition, then it converges to its stationary distribution $\pi$ at an exponential…
Motivated by applications in telecommunications, computer scienceand physics, we consider a discrete-time Markov process withrestart. At each step the process eitherwith a positive probability restarts from a given distribution, orwith the…
This study introduces a novel approach for learning mixtures of Markov chains, a critical process applicable to various fields, including healthcare and the analysis of web users. Existing research has identified a clear divide in…
The problem of missing mass in statistical inference (posed by McAllester and Ortiz, NIPS'02; most recently revisited by Changa and Thangaraj, ISIT'2019) seeks to estimate the weight of symbols that have not been sampled yet from a source.…
For any discrete target distribution, we exploit the connection between Markov chains and Stein's method via the generator approach and express the solution of Stein's equation in terms of expected hitting time. This yields new upper bounds…
For the last ten years, almost every theoretical result concerning the expected run time of a randomized search heuristic used drift theory, making it the arguably most important tool in this domain. Its success is due to its ease of use…
The convergence rate of a Markov chain to its stationary distribution is typically assessed using the concept of total variation mixing time. However, this worst-case measure often yields pessimistic estimates and is challenging to infer…
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…
This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…
We consider a form of state-dependent drift condition for a general Markov chain, whereby the chain subsampled at some deterministic time satisfies a geometric Foster-Lyapunov condition. We present sufficient criteria for such a drift…
The use of MCMC algorithms in high dimensional Bayesian problems has become routine. This has spurred so-called convergence complexity analysis, the goal of which is to ascertain how the convergence rate of a Monte Carlo Markov chain scales…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing the time average of a controlled stochastic process subject to multiple time average constraints on other related processes. The probability distribution of the random events in the system is…
Stochastic optimization methods such as mirror descent have wide applications due to low computational cost. Those methods have been well studied under assumption of the independent and identical distribution, and usually achieve sublinear…
We develop a systematic matrix-analytic approach, based on intertwinings of Markov semigroups, for proving theorems about hitting-time distributions for finite-state Markov chains -- an approach that (sometimes) deepens understanding of the…
We give computable bounds on the rate of convergence of the transition probabilities to the stationary distribution for a certain class of geometrically ergodic Markov chains. Our results are different from earlier estimates of Meyn and…
Convergence rate analyses of random walk Metropolis-Hastings Markov chains on general state spaces have largely focused on establishing sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity or on analysis of mixing times. Geometric ergodicity is a…