Related papers: Metastable Mixing of Markov Chains: Efficiently Sa…
We consider Glauber dynamics of classical spin systems of Ising type in the limit when the temperature tends to zero in finite volume. We show that information on the structure of the most profound minima and the connecting saddle points of…
Many processes in chemistry and physics take place on timescales that cannot be explored using standard molecular dynamics simulations. This renders the use of enhanced sampling mandatory. Here we introduce an enhanced sampling method that…
We give conditions under which a Markov chain constructed via parallel or simulated tempering is guaranteed to be rapidly mixing, which are applicable to a wide range of multimodal distributions arising in Bayesian statistical inference and…
Parallel tempering is a meta-algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo that uses multiple chains to sample from tempered versions of the target distribution, enhancing mixing in multi-modal distributions that are challenging for traditional…
Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the…
The Metropolis-Hastings method is often used to construct a Markov chain with a given $\pi$ as its stationary distribution. The method works even if $\pi$ is known only up to an intractable constant of proportionality. Polynomial time…
In this paper we investigate the relationship between the mixing times of the Glauber dynamics of a statistical mechanical system with its thermodynamic equilibrium structure. For this we consider the mean-field Blume-Capel model, one of…
A random walk is a basic stochastic process on graphs and a key primitive in the design of distributed algorithms. One of the most important features of random walks is that, under mild conditions, they converge to a stationary distribution…
Markov jump processes (MJPs) are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in a variety of applied disciplines. Inference for MJPs typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, the state-of-the-art being a uniformization-based…
In network modeling of complex systems one is often required to sample random realizations of networks that obey a given set of constraints, usually in form of graph measures. A much studied class of problems targets uniform sampling of…
In the field of sampling algorithms, MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) methods are widely used when direct sampling is not possible. However, multimodality of target distributions often leads to slow convergence and mixing. One common…
We investigate the lattice spacing dependence of the equilibration time for a recently proposed multiscale thermalization algorithm for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. The algorithm uses a renormalization-group matched coarse lattice…
The Gibbs sampler is a particularly popular Markov chain used for learning and inference problems in Graphical Models (GMs). These tasks are computationally intractable in general, and the Gibbs sampler often suffers from slow mixing. In…
It is natural to expect that nonbacktracking random walk will mix faster than simple random walks, but so far this has only been proved in regular graphs. To analyze typical irregular graphs, let $G$ be a random graph on $n$ vertices with…
We present an algorithm for learning mixtures of Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) from short unlabeled trajectories. Specifically, our method handles mixtures of Markov chains with optional control input by going through a…
The Gibbs sampler (a.k.a. Glauber dynamics and heat-bath algorithm) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm which iteratively samples from the conditional distributions of a probability measure $\pi$ of interest. Under the…
Through a Metropolis-like algorithm with single step computational cost of order one, we build a Markov chain that relaxes to the canonical Fermi statistics for k non-interacting particles among m energy levels. Uniformly over the…
Many modern techniques employed in physics, such a computation of path integrals, rely on random walks on graphs that can be represented as Markov chains. Traditionally, estimates of running times of such sampling algorithms are computed…
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…