Related papers: The Coupling/Minorization/Drift Approach to Markov…

In this note, a general approach to the study of non-stationary Markov chains with catastrophes and the corresponding queuing models is considered, as well as to obtain estimates of the limiting regime itself. As an illustration, an example…

This document presents methods to remove the initialization or burn-in bias from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates, with consequences on parallel computing, convergence diagnostics and performance assessment. The document is written…

We consider the Markov chain approximations for singular stable-like processes. First we obtain properties of some Markov chains. Then we construct the approximating Markov chains and give a necessary condition for weak convergence of these…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

We study the convergence rate to stationarity for a class of exchangeable partition-valued Markov chains called cut-and-paste chains. The law governing the transitions of a cut-and-paste chain are determined by products of i.i.d. stochastic…

Order-preserving couplings are elegant tools for obtaining robust estimates of the time-dependent and stationary distributions of Markov processes that are too complex to be analyzed exactly. The starting point of this paper is to study…

In this review paper, we describe the use of couplings in several different mathematical problems. We consider the total variation norm, maximal coupling, and the $\bar{d}$-distance. We present a detailed proof of a result recently proved:…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…

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 the method of differential inequalities for the computation of upper bounds for the rate of convergence to the limiting regime for one specific class of (in)homogeneous continuous-time Markov chains. To obtain these estimates, we…

For Markov chains and Markov processes exhibiting a form of stochastic monotonicity (larger states shift up transition probabilities in terms of stochastic dominance), stability and ergodicity results can be obtained using order-theoretic…

We provide explicit nonasymptotic estimates for the rate of convergence of empirical means of Markov chains, together with a Gaussian or exponential control on the deviations of empirical means. These estimates hold under a "positive…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

In the paper, we study a new rate of convergence estimate for homogeneous discrete-time nonlinear Markov chains based on the Markov-Dobrushin condition. This result generalizes the convergence estimates for any positive number of transition…

We study the rate of weak convergence of Markov chains to diffusion processes under suitable but quite general assumptions. We give an example in the financial framework, applying the convergence analysis to a multiple jumps tree…

This paper deals with a complete bipartite matching problem with the objective of finding an optimal matching that maximizes a certain generic predefined utility function on the set of all matchings. After proving the NP-hardness of the…

An important problem in the implementation of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms is to determine the convergence time, or the number of iterations before the chain is close to stationarity. For many Markov chains used in practice this time…

We compare convergence rates of Metropolis--Hastings chains to multi-modal target distributions when the proposal distributions can be of ``local'' and ``small world'' type. In particular, we show that by adding occasional long-range jumps…

Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…