Related papers: Entropic Independence II: Optimal Sampling and Con…
We study convergence to equilibrium for a large class of Markov chains in random environment. The chains are sparse in the sense that in every row of the transition matrix $P$ the mass is essentially concentrated on few entries. Moreover,…
This article provides the first procedure for computing a fully data-dependent interval that traps the mixing time $t_{\text{mix}}$ of a finite reversible ergodic Markov chain at a prescribed confidence level. The interval is computed from…
Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief…
We address the problem of estimating the mixing time $t_{\mathsf{mix}}$ of an arbitrary ergodic finite-state Markov chain from a single trajectory of length $m$. The reversible case was addressed by Hsu et al. [2019], who left the general…
In this paper we consider the problem of sampling from the low-temperature exponential random graph model (ERGM). The usual approach is via Markov chain Monte Carlo, but Bhamidi et al. showed that any local Markov chain suffers from an…
We consider two examples for a well-known method for obtaining concentration of measure (COM) bounds for a given observable in a given measure. The method is to consider an auxiliary Markov chain for which the invariant distribution is the…
Quantitative long-time entropic convergence and short-time regularization are established for an idealized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo chain which alternatively follows an Hamiltonian dynamics for a fixed time and then partially or totally…
This paper aims at improving the convergence to equilibrium of finite ergodic Markov chains via permutations and projections. First, we prove that a specific mixture of permuted Markov chains arises naturally as a projection under the KL…
The Matrix-based Renyi's entropy enables us to directly measure information quantities from given data without the costly probability density estimation of underlying distributions, thus has been widely adopted in numerous statistical…
We study the convergence of states under continuous-time depolarizing channels with full rank fixed points in terms of the relative entropy. The optimal exponent of an upper bound on the relative entropy in this case is given by the…
A major goal of stochastic thermodynamics is to estimate the inevitable dissipation that accompanies particular observable phenomena in an otherwise not fully accessible system. Quantitative results are often formulated as lower bounds on…
The switch chain is a well-known Markov chain for sampling directed graphs with a given degree sequence. While not ergodic in general, we show that it is ergodic for regular degree sequences. We then prove that the switch chain is rapidly…
We study a class of dynamical systems generated by random substitutions, which contains both intrinsically ergodic systems and instances with several measures of maximal entropy. In this class, we show that the measures of maximal entropy…
We study the mixing time of two popular discrete-time Markov chains in continuous space, the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm and the Proximal Sampler, which are discretizations of the Langevin dynamics. We extend mixing time analyses for…
The Entropy method provides a powerful framework for proving scalar concentration inequalities by establishing functional inequalities like Poincare and log-Sobolev inequalities. These inequalities are especially useful for deriving…
In this paper, we generalize the log-Sobolev inequalities to R\'enyi--Sobolev inequalities by replacing the entropy with the two-parameter entropy, which is a generalized version of entropy and closely related to R\'enyi divergences. We…
We show that the existence of a "good"' coupling w.r.t. Hamming distance for any local Markov chain on a discrete product space implies rapid mixing of the Glauber dynamics in a blackbox fashion. More specifically, we only require the…
We consider the entropy of sums of independent discrete random variables, in analogy with Shannon's Entropy Power Inequality, where equality holds for normals. In our case, infinite divisibility suggests that equality should hold for…
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…
The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…