Related papers: Metastable Mixing of Markov Chains: Efficiently Sa…
We study the ferromagnetic random field Ising model (RFIM) on a graph $G=(V,E)$ having maximal degree $\Delta$, where the external field at each vertex is an i.i.d. random variable. When the random field distribution is sufficiently…
Random metastability occurs when an externally forced or noisy system possesses more than one state of apparent equilibrium. This work investigates fluctuations in a class of random dynamical systems, arising from randomly perturbing a…
The continuous random energy model (CREM) is a toy model of spin glasses on $\{0,1\}^N$ that, in the limit, exhibits an infinitely hierarchical correlation structure. We give two polynomial-time algorithms to approximately sample from the…
Convergence rate analyses of random walk Metropolis-Hastings Markov chains on general state spaces have largely focused on establishing sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity or on analysis of mixing times. Geometric ergodicity is a…
We consider the problem of finding the transition rates of a continuous-time homogeneous Markov chain under the empirical condition that the state changes at most once during a time interval of unit length. It is proven that this…
The switch Markov chain has been extensively studied as the most natural Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach for sampling graphs with prescribed degree sequences. We use comparison arguments with other, less natural but simpler to analyze,…
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…
Activated transitions have rates that are often exponentially small in system size. Extracting the associated activation barriers is challenging in practice, especially in the deeply metastable regimes and in the presence of disorder. Here,…
Exponential family random graph models (ERGMs) can be understood in terms of a set of structural biases that act on an underlying reference distribution. This distribution determines many aspects of the behavior and interpretation of the…
The exponential family random graph modeling (ERGM) framework provides a flexible approach for the statistical analysis of networks. As ERGMs typically involve normalizing factors that are costly to compute, practical inference relies on a…
This paper studies the mixing time of certain adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. Under some regularity conditions, we show that the convergence rate of Importance Resampling MCMC (IRMCMC) algorithm, measured in terms of the total…
We study the random-cluster model on trees and treelike graphs at low temperatures. This is a model of dependent percolation parametrized by an edge probability $p\in (0,1)$ and a clustering weight $q\in [1,\infty)$, generalizing…
We study the mixing time of Glauber dynamics for Ising models in which the interaction matrix contains a single negative spectral outlier. This class includes the anti-ferromagnetic Curie-Weiss model, the anti-ferromagnetic Ising model on…
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…
Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are used to carry out inference in non-linear and non-Gaussian state space models, where the posterior density of the states is approximated using particles. Current approaches usually perform…
This paper provides a new path method that can be used to determine when an ergodic continuous-time Markov chain on $\mathbb Z^d$ converges exponentially fast to its stationary distribution in $L^2$. Specifically, we provide general…
We consider the time dependent probability distribution of a coarse grained observable Y whose evolution is governed by a discrete time map. If the map is mixing, the time dependent one-step transition probabilities converge in the long…
Energy-based models for discrete domains, such as graphs, explicitly capture relative likelihoods, naturally enabling composable probabilistic inference tasks like conditional generation or enforcing constraints at test-time. However,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are frequently used to approximately simulate high-dimensional, multimodal probability distributions. In adaptive MCMC methods, the transition kernel is changed "on the fly" in the hope to speed up…
Temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM) are powerful statistical models that can be used to infer the temporal pattern of edge formation and elimination in complex networks (e.g., social networks). TERGMs can also be used in a…