Related papers: Biased random-to-top shuffling
A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the context of card…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
The switching model is a Markov chain approach to sample graphs with fixed degree sequence uniformly at random. The recently invented Curveball algorithm for bipartite graphs applies several switches simultaneously (`trades'). Here, we…
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.…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…
Mixing of finite time-homogeneous Markov chains is well understood nowadays, with a rich set of techniques to estimate their mixing time. In this paper, we study the mixing time of random walks in dynamic random environments. To that end,…
Determining the total variation mixing time of Kac's random walk on the special orthogonal group $\mathrm{SO}(n)$ has been a long-standing open problem. In this paper, we construct a novel non-Markovian coupling for bounding this mixing…
Motivated by techniques developed in recent progress on lower bounds for sublinear time algorithms (Behnezhad, Roghani and Rubinstein, STOC 2023, FOCS 2023, and STOC 2024) we introduce and study a new class of randomized algorithmic…
We study the convergence rate to stationarity for a class of exchangeable partition-valued Markov chains called cut-and-paste chains. The law governing the transitions of a cut-and-paste chain are determined by products of i.i.d. stochastic…
The mixer chain on a graph G is the following Markov chain. Place tiles on the vertices of G, each tile labeled by its corresponding vertex. A "mixer" moves randomly on the graph, at each step either moving to a randomly chosen neighbor, or…
The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that iteratively samples variables from their conditional distributions. There are two common scan orders for the variables: random scan and systematic scan. Due to the…
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 consider the data shuffling problem in a distributed learning system, in which a master node is connected to a set of worker nodes, via a shared link, in order to communicate a set of files to the worker nodes. The master node has access…
Lifted Markov chains are Markov chains on graphs with added local "memory" and can be used to mix towards a target distribution faster than their memoryless counterparts. Upper and lower bounds on the achievable performance have been…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…
Motivated by several applications, we consider the problem of randomly rounding a fractional solution in a matroid (base) polytope to an integral one. We consider the pipage rounding technique and also present a new technique, randomized…
Random walks on expanders play a crucial role in Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, derandomization, graph theory, and distributed computing. A desirable property is that they are rapidly mixing, which is equivalent to having a spectral…
When iteratively solving linear systems By=b with Hermitian positive semi-definite $B$, and in particular when solving least-squares problems for $Ax=b$ by reformulating them as $AA^\ast y=b$, it is often observed that SOR-type methods…
Consider a list of $n$ files whose popularities are random. These files are updated according to the move-to-front rule and we consider the induced Markov chain at equilibrium. We give the exact limiting distribution of the search-cost per…