Related papers: Improved Estimation of Relaxation Time in Non-reve…
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 investigate the statistical complexity of estimating the parameters of a discrete-state Markov chain kernel from a single long sequence of state observations. In the finite case, we characterize (modulo logarithmic factors) the minimax…
When sampling a multi-modal distribution $\pi(x)$, $x\in \rr^d$, a Markov chain with local proposals is often slowly mixing; while a Small-World sampler \citep{guankrone} -- a Markov chain that uses a mixture of local and long-range…
Consider the partial sums {S_t} of a real-valued functional F(Phi(t)) of a Markov chain {Phi(t)} with values in a general state space. Assuming only that the Markov chain is geometrically ergodic and that the functional F is bounded, the…
Approximating the stationary probability of a state in a Markov chain through Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques is, in general, inefficient. Standard random walk approaches require $\tilde{O}(\tau/\pi(v))$ operations to approximate the…
The second largest eigenvalue of a transition matrix $P$ has connections with many properties of the underlying Markov chain, and especially its convergence rate towards the stationary distribution. In this paper, we give an asymptotic…
Let $G = (V,E)$ be an undirected graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ and vertex conductance $\Psi^*(G)$. We show that there exists a symmetric, stochastic matrix $P$, with off-diagonal entries supported on $E$, whose spectral gap…
We study the problem of least squares linear regression where the data-points are dependent and are sampled from a Markov chain. We establish sharp information theoretic minimax lower bounds for this problem in terms of…
The embedding problem for Markov chains is a famous problem in probability theory and only partial results are available up till now. In this paper, we propose a variant of the embedding problem called the reversible embedding problem which…
The essential spectral radius of a sub-Markovian process is defined as the infimum of the spectral radiuses of all local perturbations of the process. When the family of rescaled processes satisfies sample path large deviation principle,…
Line spectral estimation theory aims to estimate the off-the-grid spectral components of a time signal with optimal precision. Recent results have shown that it is possible to recover signals having sparse line spectra from few temporal…
Imprecise continuous-time Markov chains are a robust type of continuous-time Markov chains that allow for partially specified time-dependent parameters. Computing inferences for them requires the solution of a non-linear differential…
Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…
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…
Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the sample complexity of learning in average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) under the generative model. However, much less is known about the constrained…
We investigate the complexity of covariance matrix estimation for Gibbs distributions based on dependent samples from a Markov chain. We show that when $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality and the chain possesses a spectral gap, we can…
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…
We give computable bounds on the rate of convergence of the transition probabilities to the stationary distribution for a certain class of geometrically ergodic Markov chains. Our results are different from earlier estimates of Meyn and…
We consider nonparametric estimation of the transition operator $P$ of a Markov chain and its transition density $p$ where the singular values of $P$ are assumed to decay exponentially fast. This is for instance the case for periodised,…
We here consider the subset simulation method which approaches a failure event using a decreasing sequence of nested intermediate failure events. The method resembles importance sampling, which actively explores a probability space by…