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Related papers: Empirical PAC-Bayes Bounds for Markov Chains

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The mixing time of a Markov chain determines how fast the iterates of the Markov chain converge to the stationary distribution; however, it does not control the dependencies between samples along the Markov chain. In this paper, we study…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-30 Jiaming Liang , Siddharth Mitra , Andre Wibisono

This paper is concerned with the development of rigorous approximations to various expectations associated with Markov chains and processes having non-stationary transition probabilities. Such non-stationary models arise naturally in…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-05-07 Zeyu Zheng , Harsha Honnappa , Peter W. Glynn

We study PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with the cross entropy loss. Above all, we introduce probabilistic explanations for MLPs in two aspects: (i) MLPs formulate a family of Gibbs distributions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xinjie Lan , Xin Guo , Kenneth E. Barner

In this paper we consider $q$-state potential on general infinite trees with a nearest-neighbor $p$-adic interactions given by a stochastic matrix. {We show the uniqueness of the associated Markov chain ({\em splitting Gibbs measures})…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2019-07-08 A. Le Ny , L. Liao , U. A. Rozikov

The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non- asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately intractable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-16 Pierre Alquier , James Ridgway , Nicolas Chopin

Inference for continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) becomes challenging when the process is only observed at discrete time points. The exact likelihood is intractable, and existing methods often struggle even in medium-dimensional…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-23 Tao Tang , Lachlan Astfalck , David Dunson

Parametric Interval Markov Chains (pIMCs) are a specification formalism that extend Markov Chains (MCs) and Interval Markov Chains (IMCs) by taking into account imprecision in the transition probability values: transitions in pIMCs are…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Anicet Bart , Benoit Delahaye , Didier Lime , Eric Monfroy , Charlotte Truchet

Given access to a single long trajectory generated by an unknown irreducible Markov chain $M$, we simulate an $\alpha$-lazy version of $M$ which is ergodic. This enables us to generalize recent results on estimation and identity testing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-02 Sela Fried , Geoffrey Wolfer

Abstract We present PAC-Bayesian bounds for the generalisation error of the K-nearest-neighbour classifier (K-NN). This is achieved by casting the K-NN classifier into a kernel space framework in the limit of vanishing kernel bandwidth. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Thore Graepel , Ralf Herbrich

The ability of overparameterized deep networks to generalize well has been linked to the fact that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) finds solutions that lie in flat, wide minima in the training loss -- minima where the output of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

Deep learning is renowned for its theory-practice gap, whereby principled theory typically fails to provide much beneficial guidance for implementation in practice. This has been highlighted recently by the benign overfitting phenomenon:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-14 Liam Hodgkinson , Chris van der Heide , Robert Salomone , Fred Roosta , Michael W. Mahoney

Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-25 Haakon Michael Austad , Håkon Tjelmeland

This paper presents a novel theoretical Monte Carlo Markov chain procedure in the framework of graphs. It specifically deals with the construction of a Markov chain whose empirical distribution converges to a given reference one. The Markov…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-07-02 Roy Cerqueti , Emilio De Santis

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Imon Banerjee , Harsha Honnappa , Vinayak Rao

Early-exit neural networks enable adaptive computation by allowing confident predictions to exit at intermediate layers, achieving 2-8$\times$ inference speedup. Despite widespread deployment, their generalization properties lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

For many Markov chains of practical interest, the invariant distribution is extremely sensitive to perturbations of some entries of the transition matrix, but insensitive to others; we give an example of such a chain, motivated by a problem…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-10-12 Erik Thiede , Brian Van Koten , Jonathan Weare

We study continuous-time Markov chains on the non-negative integers under mild regularity conditions (in particular, the set of jump vectors is finite and both forward and backward jumps are possible). Based on the so-called flux balance…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-11-26 Mads Chr Hansen , Carsten Wiuf , Chuang Xu

The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-25 Daniel Hsu , Aryeh Kontorovich , David A. Levin , Yuval Peres , Csaba Szepesvári

The partial sum of the states of a Markov chain or more generally a Markov source is asymptotically normally distributed under suitable conditions. One of these conditions is that the variance is unbounded. A simple combinatorial…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Sara Kropf

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-09 Sergey Bravyi , Giuseppe Carleo , David Gosset , Yinchen Liu