Related papers: Missing Mass Concentration for Markov Chains
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
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…
Adaptive importance sampling is a powerful tool to sample from complicated target densities, but its success depends sensitively on the initial proposal density. An algorithm is presented to automatically perform the initialization using…
Consider a sequence of continuous-time irreducible reversible Markov chains and a sequence of initial distributions, $\mu_n$. The sequence is said to exhibit $\mu_n$-cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is…
Finite order Markov models are theoretically well-studied models for dependent discrete data. Despite their generality, application in empirical work when the order is large is rare. Practitioners avoid using higher order Markov models…
Halo masses and concentrations have been studied extensively, by means of N-body simulations as well as observationally, during the last decade. Nevertheless, the exact form of the mass-concentration relation is still widely debated. One of…
We study the so-called two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a simulation-based approach for finding the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators. Our focus is to characterize its finite-time performance in a Markov setting, which often…
Missing data imputation, where a model is trained on observed data to estimate unobserved values, is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper, we rigorously formulate imputation model learning as a mean-squared error risk…
We study the convergence of random function iterations for finding an invariant measure of the corresponding Markov operator. We call the problem of finding such an invariant measure the stochastic fixed point problem. This generalizes…
Let $\{W_t\}_{t=1}^{\infty}$ be a finite state stationary Markov chain, and suppose that $f$ is a real-valued function on the state space. If $f$ is bounded, then Gillman's expander Chernoff bound (1993) provides concentration estimates for…
Markov chains are a common framework for individual-based state and time discrete models in ecology and evolution. Their use, however, is largely limited to systems with a low number of states, since the transition matrices involved pose…
We discuss problems posed by the quantitative study of time inhomogeneous Markov chains. The two main notions for our purpose are merging and stability. Merging (also called weak ergodicity) occurs when the chain asymptotically forgets…
Systems of interacting continuous-time Markov chains are a powerful model class, but inference is typically intractable in high dimensional settings. Auxiliary information, such as noisy observations, is typically only available at discrete…
We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…
A classical problem for Markov chains is determining their stationary (or steady-state) distribution. This problem has an equally classical solution based on eigenvectors and linear equation systems. However, this approach does not scale to…
Markov models are often used to capture the temporal patterns of sequential data for statistical learning applications. While the Hidden Markov modeling-based learning mechanisms are well studied in literature, we analyze a…
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…
Markov chain analysis is a key technique in formal verification. A practical obstacle is that all probabilities in Markov models need to be known. However, system quantities such as failure rates or packet loss ratios, etc. are often not --…
We consider the computational task of sampling a bit string $x$ from a distribution $\pi(x)=|\langle x|\psi\rangle|^2$, where $\psi$ is the unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian $H$. Our main result describes a direct link between the…
We present a multihistogram reweighting technique for nonequilibrium Markov Chains with discrete energies. The method generalizes the single histogram method of Yin et al. [Phys. Rev. E72, 036122 (2005)], making it possible to calculate the…