Related papers: Metastable Mixing of Markov Chains: Efficiently Sa…

We give a new rapid mixing result for a natural random walk on the independent sets of a graph $G$. We show that when $G$ has bounded treewidth, this random walk -- known as the Glauber dynamics for the hardcore model -- mixes rapidly for…

Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…

Modern problems in astronomical Bayesian inference require efficient methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional, often multi-modal probability distributions. Most popular methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, perform…

In the study of Markov chain mixing times, analysis has centered on the performance from a worst-case starting state. Here, in the context of Glauber dynamics for the one-dimensional Ising model, we show how new ideas from information…

We study the performance of Markov chains for the $q$-state ferromagnetic Potts model on random regular graphs. It is conjectured that their performance is dictated by metastability phenomena, i.e., the presence of "phases" (clusters) in…

Simulated and parallel tempering are families of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms where a temperature parameter is varied during the simulation to overcome bottlenecks to convergence due to multimodality. In this work we introduce and…

We consider the stochastic Ising model on sparse Erdos-Renyi graphs $G(n,d/n)$ with $d>1$ at the critical temperature $\beta_c=\tanh^{-1}(d^{-1})$ and prove that with high probability, the mixing time is at most polynomial in $n$. Our…

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…

The exponential random graph model (ERGM) is a central object in the study of clustering properties in social networks as well as canonical ensembles in statistical physics. Despite some breakthrough works in the mathematical understanding…

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…

Mixing of finite time-homogeneous Markov chains is well understood nowadays, with a rich set of techniques to estimate their mixing time. In this paper, we study the mixing time of random walks in dynamic random environments. To that end,…

A family $\{Q_{\beta}\}_{\beta \geq 0}$ of Markov chains is said to exhibit $\textit{metastable mixing}$ with $\textit{modes}$ $S_{\beta}^{(1)},\ldots,S_{\beta}^{(k)}$ if its spectral gap (or some other mixing property) is very close to the…

Finding a ground state of a given Hamiltonian of an Ising model on a graph $G=(V,E)$ is an important but hard problem. The standard approach for this kind of problem is the application of algorithms that rely on single-spin-flip Markov…

We study metastability and mixing time for a non-reversible probabilistic cellular automaton. With a suitable choice of the parameters, we first show that the stationary distribution is close in total variation to a low temperature Ising…

We propose two algorithms for simulating continuous time Markov chains in the presence of metastability. We show that the algorithms correctly estimate, under the ergodicity assumption, stationary averages of the process. Both algorithms,…

We provide a general bound on the Wasserstein distance between two arbitrary distributions of sequences of Bernoulli random variables. The bound is in terms of a mixing quantity for the Glauber dynamics of one of the sequences, and a simple…

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…

It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…

We introduce a general class of mean-field-like spin systems with random couplings that comprises both the Ising model on inhomogeneous dense random graphs and the randomly diluted Hopfield model. We are interested in quantitative estimates…

We prove that any Markov chain that performs local, reversible updates on randomly chosen vertices of a bounded-degree graph necessarily has mixing time at least $\Omega(n\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. Our bound applies to…