Related papers: Relation between Hitting Times and Probabilities f…
This paper deals with control of partially observable discrete-time stochastic systems. It introduces and studies Markov Decision Processes with Incomplete Information and with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. The important…
When the initial and transition probabilities of a finite Markov chain in discrete time are not well known, we should perform a sensitivity analysis. This is done by considering as basic uncertainty models the so-called credal sets that…
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…
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given…
We analyse the structure of imprecise Markov chains and study their convergence by means of accessibility relations. We first identify the sets of states, so-called minimal permanent classes, that are the minimal sets capable of containing…
Stochastic time-varying optimization is an integral part of learning in which the shape of the function changes over time in a non-deterministic manner. This paper considers multiple models of stochastic time variation and analyzes the…
We study perturbation theory and uniform ergodicity for discrete-time Markov chains on general state spaces in terms of the uniform moments of the first hitting times on some set. The methods we adopt are different from previous ones. For…
We study the verification of a finite continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) C against a linear real-time specification given as a deterministic timed automaton (DTA) A with finite or Muller acceptance conditions. The central question that we…
We consider the problem of approximating the probability mass of the set of timed paths under a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) that are accepted by a deterministic timed automaton (DTA). As opposed to several existing works on this…
In a model of communication in a social network described by a simple consensus model, we pose the problem of finding a subset of nodes with given cardinality and fixed consensus values that enable the fastest convergence rate to…
The paper studies an improved estimate for the rate of convergence for nonlinear homogeneous discrete-time Markov chains. These processes are nonlinear in terms of the distribution law. Hence, the transition kernels are dependent on the…
We study the limit behaviour of upper and lower bounds on expected time averages in imprecise Markov chains; a generalised type of Markov chain where the local dynamics, traditionally characterised by transition probabilities, are now…
An aperiodic and irreducible Markov chain on a finite state space converges to its stationary distribution. When convergence to equilibrium is measured by total variation distance, there exists an optimal coupling and a maximal coupling…
If the state space of a homogeneous continuous-time Markov chain is too large, making inferences - here limited to determining marginal or limit expectations - becomes computationally infeasible. Fortunately, the state space of such a chain…
Given a discrete source distribution $\mu$ and discrete target distribution $\nu$ on a common finite state space $\mathcal{X}$, we are tasked with transporting $\mu$ to $\nu$ using a given discrete-time Markov chain $X$ with the quickest…
Many problems of practical interest rely on Continuous-time Markov chains~(CTMCs) defined over combinatorial state spaces, rendering the computation of transition probabilities, and hence probabilistic inference, difficult or impossible…
Consider a Markov chain with finite state space and suppose you wish to change time replacing the integer step index $n$ with a random counting process $N(t)$. What happens to the mixing time of the Markov chain? We present a partial reply…
In this short paper, we connect the procedure of constructing a totally inaccessible stopping time for a given process using the well-known Cox construction, dependent on an independent exponential random variable; with naturally occurring…
In this work we make use of generalized inverses associated with quantum channels acting on finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, so that one may calculate the mean hitting time for a particle to reach a chosen goal subspace. The questions…
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…