Related papers: Perfect Sampling Using Bounding Chains
In a series of recent works, Boyd, Diaconis, and their co-authors have introduced a semidefinite programming approach for computing the fastest mixing Markov chain on a graph of allowed transitions, given a target stationary distribution.…
Arguing about the equilibrium distribution of continuous-time Markov chains can be vital for showing properties about the underlying systems. For example in biological systems, bistability of a chemical reaction network can hint at its…
In this paper we develop a general framework for constructing and analysing coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, allowing for both (possibly degenerate) diffusion and piecewise deterministic Markov processes. For many performance…
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…
We introduce a new perfect sampling technique that can be applied to general Gibbs distributions and runs in linear time if the correlation decays faster than the neighborhood growth. In particular, in graphs with sub-exponential…
The switch chain is a well-known Markov chain for sampling directed graphs with a given degree sequence. While not ergodic in general, we show that it is ergodic for regular degree sequences. We then prove that the switch chain is rapidly…
Many applications in the field of statistics require Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Determining appropriate starting values and run lengths can be both analytically and empirically challenging. A desire to overcome these problems has led…
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 consider the problem of bounding mean first passage times for a class of continuous-time Markov chains that captures stochastic interactions between groups of identical agents. The quantitative analysis of such probabilistic population…
We consider the problem of uniformly generating a spanning tree, of a connected undirected graph. This process is useful to compute statistics, namely for phylogenetic trees. We describe a Markov chain for producing these trees. For cycle…
We address the problem of sampling colorings of a graph $G$ by Markov chain simulation. For most of the article we restrict attention to proper $q$-colorings of a path on $n$ vertices (in statistical physics terms, the one-dimensional…
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…
Most Markov chain Monte Carlo methods operate in discrete time and are reversible with respect to the target probability. Nevertheless, it is now understood that the use of non-reversible Markov chains can be beneficial in many contexts. In…
Parametric Markov chains occur quite naturally in various applications: they can be used for a conservative analysis of probabilistic systems (no matter how the parameter is chosen, the system works to specification); they can be used to…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are central in computational statistics, and typically rely on detailed balance to ensure invariance with respect to a target distribution. Although straightforward to construct by Metropolization, this can…
Generation of deviates from random graph models with non-trivial edge dependence is an increasingly important problem. Here, we introduce a method which allows perfect sampling from random graph models in exponential family form…
We propose and develop a novel and effective perfect sampling methodology for simulating from posteriors corresponding to mixtures with either known (fixed) or unknown number of components. For the latter we consider the Dirichlet…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…
We investigate absorption, i.e., almost sure convergence to an absorbing state, in time-varying (non-homogeneous) discrete-time Markov chains with finite state space. We consider systems that can switch among a finite set of transition…
Full Bayesian computational inference for model determination in undirected graphical models is currently restricted to decomposable graphs, except for problems of very small scale. In this paper we develop new, more efficient methodology…