Related papers: Quantized Markov Chain Couplings that Prepare Qsam…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is at the heart of efficient approximation schemes for a wide range of problems in combinatorial enumeration and statistical physics. It is therefore very natural and important to determine whether…
Perfect sampling is a technique that uses coupling arguments to provide a sample from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain in a finite time without ever computing the distribution. This technique is very efficient if all the events…
We use coupling to study the time taken until the distribution of a statistic on a Markov chain is close to its stationary distribution. Coupling is a common technique used to obtain upper bounds on mixing times of Markov chains, and we…
This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
The preparation of the stationary distribution of irreducible, time-reversible Markov chains is a fundamental building block in many heuristic approaches to algorithmically hard problems. It has been conjectured that quantum analogs of…
The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…
We survey existing techniques to bound the mixing time of Markov chains. The mixing time is related to a geometric parameter called conductance which is a measure of edge-expansion. Bounds on conductance are typically obtained by a…
The method of 'coupling from the past' permits exact sampling from the invariant distribution of a Markov chain on a finite state space. The coupling is successful whenever the stochastic dynamics are such that there is coalescence of all…
We consider Markovian models on graphs with local dynamics. We show that, under suitable conditions, such Markov chains exhibit both rapid convergence to equilibrium and strong concentration of measure in the stationary distribution. We…
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…
Markov chain methods are remarkably successful in computational physics, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization. The cost of such methods often reduces to the mixing time, i.e., the time required to reach the steady state of the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is a widely used algorithm design scheme with many applications. To make efficient use of this method, the key step is to prove that the Markov chain is rapid mixing. Canonical paths is one of the two…
Quantum walks on graphs have been shown in certain cases to mix quadratically faster than their classical counterparts. Lifted Markov chains, consisting of a Markov chain on an extended state space which is projected back down to the…
Sampling from the stationary distribution is one of the fundamental tasks of Markov chain-based algorithms and has important applications in machine learning, combinatorial optimization and network science. For the quantum case, qsampling…
Quantum Markov chains (QMCs) are positive maps on a trace-class space describing open quantum dynamics on graphs. Such objects have a statistical resemblance with classical random walks, while at the same time it allows for internal…
Since 1997 a considerable effort has been spent to study the mixing time of switch Markov chains on the realizations of graphic degree sequences of simple graphs. Several results were proved on rapidly mixing Markov chains on unconstrained,…
A wide class of ``counting'' problems have been studied in Computer Science. Three typical examples are the estimation of - (i) the permanent of an $n\times n$ 0-1 matrix, (ii) the partition function of certain $n-$ particle Statistical…
We introduce quantum versions of the $\chi^2$-divergence, provide a detailed analysis of their properties, and apply them in the investigation of mixing times of quantum Markov processes. An approach similar to the one presented in [1-3]…
Bounding chains are a technique that offers three benefits to Markov chain practitioners: a theoretical bound on the mixing time of the chain under restricted conditions, experimental bounds on the mixing time of the chain that are provably…
The convergence rate of a Markov chain to its stationary distribution is typically assessed using the concept of total variation mixing time. However, this worst-case measure often yields pessimistic estimates and is challenging to infer…