Related papers: Formal Error Bounds for the State Space Reduction …
This paper compiles several aspects of the dynamics of stochastic approximation algorithms with Markov iterate-dependent noise when the iterates are not known to be stable beforehand. We achieve the same by extending the lock-in probability…
We introduce a framework to approximate a Markov Decision Process that stands on two pillars: state aggregation -- as the algorithmic infrastructure; and central-limit-theorem-type approximations -- as the mathematical underpinning of…
The approximation of integral functionals with respect to a stationary Markov process by a Riemann-sum estimator is studied. Stationarity and the functional calculus of the infinitesimal generator of the process are used to get a better…
In the paper, we study a new rate of convergence estimate for homogeneous discrete-time nonlinear Markov chains based on the Markov-Dobrushin condition. This result generalizes the convergence estimates for any positive number of transition…
Fast distributed algorithms that output a feasible solution for constraint satisfaction problems, such as maximal independent sets, have been heavily studied. There has been much less research on distributed sampling problems, where one…
The time to converge to the steady state of a finite Markov chain can be greatly reduced by a lifting operation, which creates a new Markov chain on an expanded state space. For a class of quadratic objectives, we show an analogous behavior…
Based on information theory, we present a method to determine an optimal Markov approximation for modelling and prediction from time series data. The method finds a balance between minimal modelling errors by taking as much as possible…
We analyse the performance of a recursive Monte Carlo method for the Bayesian estimation of the static parameters of a discrete--time state--space Markov model. The algorithm employs two layers of particle filters to approximate the…
We study a Markovian agent-based model (MABM) in this paper. Each agent is endowed with a local state that changes over time as the agent interacts with its neighbours. The neighbourhood structure is given by a graph. In a recent paper…
A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…
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…
In systems of programmable matter, we are given a collection of simple computation elements (or particles) with limited (constant-size) memory. We are interested in when they can self-organize to solve system-wide problems of movement,…
The simplest, and most common, stochastic model for population processes, including those from biochemistry and cell biology, are continuous time Markov chains. Simulation of such models is often relatively straightforward as there are…
Over the last three decades, there has been a considerable effort within the applied probability community to develop techniques for bounding the convergence rates of general state space Markov chains. Most of these results assume the…
This paper uses the generator approach of Stein's method to analyze the gap between steady-state distributions of Markov chains and diffusion processes. Until now, the standard way to invoke Stein's method for this problem was to use the…
Recently there is a large amount of work devoted to the study of Markov chain stochastic gradient methods (MC-SGMs) which mainly focus on their convergence analysis for solving minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a…
We propose a general error analysis related to the low-rank approximation of a given real matrix in both the spectral and Frobenius norms. First, we derive deterministic error bounds that hold with some minimal assumptions. Second, we…
This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…
In this work, we study a natural nonparametric estimator of the transition probability matrices of a finite controlled Markov chain. We consider an offline setting with a fixed dataset, collected using a so-called logging policy. We develop…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…