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

We study the mixing time of the single-site update Markov chain, known as the Glauber dynamics, for generating a random independent set of a tree. Our focus is obtaining optimal convergence results for arbitrary trees. We consider the more…

In this paper we study a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Gibbs sampler for solving the integer least-squares problem. In digital communication the problem is equivalent to performing Maximum Likelihood (ML) detection in Multiple-Input…

We study a class of Markov chains that describe reversible stochastic dynamics of a large class of disordered mean field models at low temperatures. Our main purpose is to give a precise relation between the metastable time scales in the…

We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…

We study a simple Markov chain, the switch chain, on the set of all perfect matchings in a bipartite graph. This Markov chain was proposed by Diaconis, Graham and Holmes as a possible approach to a sampling problem arising in Statistics. We…

This paper introduces the Attracting Random Walks model, which describes the dynamics of a system of particles on a graph with $n$ vertices. At each step, a single particle moves to an adjacent vertex (or stays at the current one) with…

Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…

Time-homogeneous Markov chains are often used as disease progression models in studies of cost-effectiveness and optimal decision-making. Maximum likelihood estimation of these models can be challenging when data are collected at a time…

Let $\gS=(V,E)$ be a finite, $d$-regular bipartite graph. For any $\lambda>0$ let $\pi_\lambda$ be the probability measure on the independent sets of $\gS$ in which the set $I$ is chosen with probability proportional to $\lambda^{|I|}$…

We prove rapid mixing for certain Markov chains on the set $S_n$ of permutations on $1,2,\dots,n$ in which adjacent transpositions are made with probabilities that depend on the items being transposed. Typically, when in state $\sigma$, a…

For distributions over discrete product spaces $\prod_{i=1}^n \Omega_i'$, Glauber dynamics is a Markov chain that at each step, resamples a random coordinate conditioned on the other coordinates. We show that $k$-Glauber dynamics, which…

Markov chains are convenient means of generating realizations of networks with a given (joint or otherwise) degree distribution, since they simply require a procedure for rewiring edges. The major challenge is to find the right number of…

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…

We consider the Ising, and more generally, $q$-state Potts Glauber dynamics on random $d$-regular graphs on $n$ vertices at low temperatures $\beta \gtrsim \frac{\log d}{d}$. The mixing time is exponential in $n$ due to a bottleneck between…

We study the problem of generating a sample from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain, given a method to simulate the chain. We give an approximation algorithm for the case of a random walk on a regular graph with n vertices that…

Atomistic simulations provide valuable insights into the physical processes governing material behavior. However, their applicability is fundamentally constrained by the limited time scales accessible to brute-force simulations. This…

We show that efficient approximate sampling algorithms, combined with a slow exponential time oracle for computing its output distribution, can be combined into constructing efficient perfect samplers, which sample exactly from a target…

Social networks as a representation of relational data, often possess multiple types of dependency structures at the same time. There could be clustering (beyond homophily) at a macro level as well as transitivity (a friend's friend is more…

A key task in Bayesian machine learning is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). One prevalent example of this is sampling posteriors in parametric distributions,…

We consider Markovian models on graphs with local dynamics. We show that, under suitable conditions, such Markov chains exhibit both rapid convergence to equilibrium and strong concentration of measure in the stationary distribution. We…