Related papers: Mixing times of lozenge tiling and card shuffling …
We study the theoretical complexity of simulated tempering for sampling from mixtures of log-concave components differing only by location shifts. The main result establishes the first polynomial-time guarantee for simulated tempering…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in probability theory in general and in machine learning in particular. A Markov chain is devised so that its stationary distribution is some probability distribution of interest.…
There exist very few results on mixing for non-stationary processes. However, mixing is often required in statistical inference for non-stationary processes such as time-varying ARCH (tvARCH) models. In this paper, bounds for the mixing…
We presented in \cite{bl2,bl7} an approach to derive the metastable behavior of continuous-time Markov chains. We assumed in these articles that the Markov chains visit points in the time scale in which it jumps among the metastable sets.…
Given a finite graph G, a vertex of the lamplighter graph consists of a zero-one labeling of the vertices of G, and a marked vertex of G. For transitive graphs G, we show that, up to constants, the relaxation time for simple random walk in…
In this paper, we study consistent and partially exchangeable sequences of Markov chains on a finite state space. We provide a characterisation of the admissible transition rates via a decomposition into individual and coordinated motion of…
For any discrete target distribution, we exploit the connection between Markov chains and Stein's method via the generator approach and express the solution of Stein's equation in terms of expected hitting time. This yields new upper bounds…
Let $X$ be a lazy random walk on a graph $G$. If $G$ is undirected, then the mixing time is upper bounded by the maximum hitting time of the graph. This fails for directed chains, as the biased random walk on the cycle $\mathbb{Z}_n$ shows.…
This paper studies Markov chains on the chambers of real hyperplane arrangements, a model that generalizes famous examples, such as the Tsetlin library and riffle shuffles. We discuss cutoff for the Tsetlin library for general weights, and…
We investigate the $k$-cycle shuffle on repeated cards, namely on a deck consisting of $l$ identical copies of each of $m$ card types, with total size $n=ml$. We establish asymptotic results for the total variation mixing of this shuffle,…
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…
We study the mixing time of a systematic scan Markov chain for sampling from the uniform distribution on proper 7-colourings of a finite rectangular sub-grid of the infinite square lattice, the grid. A systematic scan Markov chain cycles…
Quantum speedup for mixing a Markov chain can be achieved based on the construction of slowly-varying $r$ Markov chains where the initial chain can be easily prepared and the spectral gaps have uniform lower bound. The overall complexity is…
Convergence analysis of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in high-dimensional statistical applications is increasingly recognized. In this paper, we develop general mixing time bounds for Metropolis-Hastings algorithms on discrete spaces by…
The theory of rapid mixing random walks plays a fundamental role in the study of modern randomised algorithms. Usually, the mixing time is measured with respect to the worst initial position. It is well known that the presence of…
We show a strict hierarchy among various edge and vertex expansion properties of Markov chains. This gives easy proofs of a range of bounds, both classical and new, on chi-square distance, spectral gap and mixing time. The 2-gradient is…
Convergence diagnosis for Markov chain Monte Carlo is a matter of fundamental importance in computational statistics: it determines the resources allocated to a particular sampling problem and influences the practitioner's view of the…
This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…
Conventional wisdom in the sampling literature, backed by a popular diffusion scaling limit, suggests that the mixing time of the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) scales as $O(d^{1/3})$, where $d$ is the dimension. However, the…
In the hard-core model on a finite graph we are given a parameter lambda>0, and an independent set I arises with probability proportional to lambda^|I|. On infinite graphs a Gibbs distribution is defined as a suitable limit with the correct…