Related papers: Localization Schemes: A Framework for Proving Mixi…
Lifted Markov chains are Markov chains on graphs with added local "memory" and can be used to mix towards a target distribution faster than their memoryless counterparts. Upper and lower bounds on the achievable performance have been…
In this paper we consider the field of local times of a discrete-time Markov chain on a general state space, and obtain uniform (in time) upper bounds on the total variation distance between this field and the one of a sequence of $n$…
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 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…
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 --…
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…
There has been a recent surge of powerful tools to show rapid mixing of Markov chains, via functional inequalities such as Poincar\'e inequalities. In many situations, Markov chains fail to mix rapidly from a worst-case initialization, yet…
The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…
We consider Markov chains on general state spaces in stationary random environment which are defined by a random mapping that is contractive up to a bounded perturbation. We prove their convergence to a limiting law, providing convergence…
We consider continuous-space, discrete-time Markov chains on $\mathbb{R}^d$, that admit a finite number $N$ of metastable states. Our main motivation for investigating these processes is to analyse random Poincar\'e maps, which describe…
The hard-sphere model is one of the most extensively studied models in statistical physics. It describes the continuous distribution of spherical particles, governed by hard-core interactions. An important quantity of this model is the…
A time-dependent finite-state Markov chain that uses doubly stochastic transition matrices, is considered. Entropic quantities that describe the randomness of the probability vectors, and also the randomness of the discrete paths, are…
A block Markov chain is a Markov chain whose state space can be partitioned into a finite number of clusters such that the transition probabilities only depend on the clusters. Block Markov chains thus serve as a model for Markov chains…
Markov chains are a natural and well understood tool for describing one-dimensional patterns in time or space. We show how to infer $k$-th order Markov chains, for arbitrary $k$, from finite data by applying Bayesian methods to both…
We show how to combine Fourier analysis with coupling arguments to bound the mixing times of a variety of Markov chains. The mixing time is the number of steps a Markov chain takes to approach its equilibrium distribution. One application…
The spectral gap of a Markov chain can be bounded by the spectral gaps of constituent "restriction" chains and a "projection" chain, and the strength of such a bound is the content of various decomposition theorems. In this paper, we…
We introduce a framework for the control of discrete-time switched stochastic systems with uncertain distributions. In particular, we consider stochastic dynamics with additive noise whose distribution lies in an ambiguity set of…
We study stochastic approximation procedures for approximately solving a $d$-dimensional linear fixed point equation based on observing a trajectory of length $n$ from an ergodic Markov chain. We first exhibit a non-asymptotic bound of the…
Focusing on stochastic systems arising in mean-field models, the systems under consideration belong to the class of switching diffusions, in which continuous dynamics and discrete events coexist and interact. The discrete events are modeled…
We present new scalar and matrix Chernoff-style concentration bounds for a broad class of probability distributions over the binary hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$. Motivated by recent tools developed for the study of mixing times of Markov chains on…