Related papers: Drift, Minorization, and Hitting Times
We study generalizations of the Schr\"odinger problem in statistical mechanics in two directions: when the density is constrained at more than two times, and when the joint law of the initial and final positions for the particles is…
This paper studies the problem of ergodicity of transition probability matrices in Markovian models, such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), and how it makes very difficult the task of learning to represent long-term context for sequential…
We investigate the problem of optimal dividend distribution for a company in the presence of regime shifts. We consider a company whose cumulative net revenues evolve as a Brownian motion with positive drift that is modulated by a finite…
It is well known that the distributions of hitting times in Markov chains are quite irregular, unless the limit as time tends to infinity is considered. We show that nevertheless for a typical finite irreducible Markov chain and for…
In this note, we are concerned with the subgeometric rate of convergence of a Markov chain with discrete time parameter to its invariant measure in the $f$-norm. We clarify how three typical subgeometric rates of convergence are inherited…
In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the…
Continuous time financial market models are often motivated as scaling limits of discrete time models. The objective of this paper is to establish such a connection for a robust framework. More specifically, we consider discrete time models…
The goal of this expository paper is to describe conditions which guarantee a central limit theorem for functionals of general state space Markov chains. This is done with a view towards Markov chain Monte Carlo settings and hence the focus…
We consider stochastic optimization problems where data is drawn from a Markov chain. Existing methods for this setting crucially rely on knowing the mixing time of the chain, which in real-world applications is usually unknown. We propose…
We generalise the coarse Ricci curvature method of Ollivier by considering the coarse Ricci curvature of multiple steps in the Markov chain. This implies new spectral bounds and concentration inequalities. We also extend this approach to…
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…
The data processing inequality is central to information theory and motivates the study of monotonic divergences. However, it is not clear operationally we need to consider all such divergences. We establish a simple method for Pinsker…
A sequence of Markov chains is said to exhibit (total variation) cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is abrupt. We consider reversible lazy chains. We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the…
We investigate the mixing properties of a model of reversible Markov chains in random environment, which notably contains the simple random walk on the superposition of a deterministic graph and a second graph whose vertex set has been…
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…
Motivated in part by a problem in simulated tempering (a form of Markov chain Monte Carlo) we seek to minimise, in a suitable sense, the time it takes a (regular) diffusion with instantaneous reflection at 0 and 1 to travel from the origin…
In this invited contribution, we revisit the stochastic shortest path problem, and show how recent results allow one to improve over the classical solutions: we present algorithms to synthesize strategies with multiple guarantees on the…
Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…
This paper focuses on the strong convergence of the truncated $\theta$-Milstein method for a class of nonautonomous stochastic differential delay equations whose drift and diffusion coefficients can grow polynomially. The convergence rate,…
A new approach is developed for evaluating the convergence rate for nonlinear Markov chains (MC) based on the recently developed spectral radius technique of markovian coupling for linear MC and the idea of small nonlinear perturbations of…