Related papers: Mixing on the cycle with constant size perturbatio…

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…

We study the mixing time of the $(n,k)$ Bernoulli--Laplace urn model, where $k\in\{0,1,\ldots,n\}$. Consider two urns, each containing $n$ balls, so that when combined they have precisely $n$ red balls and $n$ white balls. At each step of…

A cycle base of a permutation group is defined to be a maximal set of its pairwise non-conjugate regular cyclic subgroups. It is proved that a cycle base of a permutation group of degree $n$ can be constructed in polynomial time in~$n$.

Rate processes are simple and analytically tractable models for many dynamical systems which switch stochastically between a discrete set of quasi stationary states but they may also approximate continuous processes by coarse grained,…

We prove a number of results, new and old, about the cycle type of a random permutation on S_n. Underlying our analysis is the idea that the number of cycles of size k is roughly Poisson distributed with parameter 1/k. In particular, we…

Motivated by applications in telecommunications, computer scienceand physics, we consider a discrete-time Markov process withrestart. At each step the process eitherwith a positive probability restarts from a given distribution, orwith the…

We establish three remarkable consequences of non-negative curvature for sparse Markov chains. First, their conductance decreases logarithmically with the number of states. Second, their displacement is at least diffusive until the mixing…

We study the mixing time of the unit-rate zero-range process on the complete graph, in the regime where the number $n$ of sites tends to infinity while the density of particles per site stabilizes to some limit $\rho>0$. We prove that the…

We propose polynomial-time algorithms to minimise labelled Markov chains whose transition probabilities are not known exactly, have been perturbed, or can only be obtained by sampling. Our algorithms are based on a new notion of an…

Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while…

In this paper, we consider the Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for random sampling of combinatorial objects. The running time of such an algorithm depends on the total mixing time of the underlying Markov chain and is unknown in…

Let $(X_t)_{t = 0 }^{\infty}$ be an irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chain on a finite state space $\Omega $. Denote its transition matrix by $P$. To avoid periodicity issues (and thus ensuring convergence to equilibrium) one…

We consider permutations of $\{1,...,n\}$ obtained by $\lfloor\sqrt{n}t\rfloor$ independent applications of random stirring. In each step the same marked stirring element is transposed with probability $1/n$ with any one of the $n$…

Consider a Markov chain $\{X_n\}_{n\ge 0}$ with an ergodic probability measure $\pi$. Let $\Psi$ a function on the state space of the chain, with $\alpha$-tails with respect to $\pi$, $\alpha\in (0,2)$. We find sufficient conditions on the…

Random walks (or Markov chains) are models extensively used in theoretical computer science. Several tools, including analysis of quantities such as hitting and mixing times, are helpful for devising randomized algorithms. A notable example…

For each $n$ let $Y^n_t$ be a continuous time symmetric Markov chain with state space $n^{-1} \Z^d$. A condition in terms of the conductances is given for the convergence of the $Y^n_t$ to a symmetric Markov process $Y_t$ on $\R^d$. We have…

We analyse a random walk on the ring of integers mod $n$, which at each time point can make an additive `step' or a multiplicative `jump'. When the probability of making a jump tends to zero as an appropriate power of $n$ we prove the…

We consider the exclusion process on segments of the integers in a site-dependent random environment. We assume to be in the ballistic regime in which a single particle has positive linear speed. Our goal is to study the mixing time of the…

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…

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used to evaluate the imaginary-time path integral of a quantum oscillator with a potential that includes both a quadratic term and a quartic term whose coupling is varied by several orders of…