Related papers: Mixing times via super-fast coupling

We study Markov chains which model genome rearrangements. These models are useful for studying the equilibrium distribution of chromosomal lengths, and are used in methods for estimating genomic distances. The primary Markov chain studied…

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…

Consider shuffling a deck of $n$ cards, labeled $1$ through $n$, as follows: at each time step, pick one card uniformly with your right hand and another card, independently and uniformly with your left hand; then swap the cards. How long…

The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of(undirected) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the sampling. The…

We find the total variation mixing time of the interchange process on the dumbbell graph (two complete graphs, $K_n$ and $K_m$, connected by a single edge), and show that this sequence of chains exhibits the cutoff phenomenon precisely when…

The random transposition shuffle on repeated cards induces a Markov chain on the quotient space of arrangements with multiplicities, and is equivalent to the many-urn mean-field Bernoulli-Laplace model introduced by Scarabotti. Writing…

We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…

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 $kn$…

We consider a problem of shuffling a deck of cards with ordered labels. Namely we split the deck of N=k^tq cards (where t>=1 is maximal) into k equally sized stacks and then take the top card off of each stack and sort them by the order of…

Since 1997 a considerable effort has been spent to study the mixing time of switch Markov chains on the realizations of graphic degree sequences of simple graphs. Several results were proved on rapidly mixing Markov chains on unconstrained,…

Determining the mixing time of Kac's random walk on the sphere $\mathrm{S}^{n-1}$ is a long-standing open problem. We show that the total variation mixing time of Kac's walk on $\mathrm{S}^{n-1}$ is between $\frac{1}{2} \, n \log(n)$ and…

We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…

We prove rapid mixing for certain Markov chains on the set $S_n$ of permutations on $1,2,\dots,n$ in which adjacent transpositions are made with probabilities that depend on the items being transposed. Typically, when in state $\sigma$, a…

Consider a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ as a deck of cards numbered from 1 to $n$ and laid out in a row, where $\sigma_j$ denotes the number of the card that is in the $j$-th position from the left.\rm\ We define two cyclic to random…

Sampling permutations from S_n is a fundamental problem from probability theory. The nearest neighbor transposition chain \cal{M}}_{nn} is known to converge in time \Theta(n^3 \log n) in the uniform case and time \Theta(n^2) in the constant…

The edge flipping is a non-reversible Markov chain on a given connected graph, which is defined by Chung and Graham. In the same paper, its eigenvalues and stationary distributions for some classes of graphs are identified. We further study…

We investigate the mixing properties of a model of reversible Markov chains in random environment, which notably contains the simple random walk on the superposition of a deterministic graph and a second graph whose vertex set has been…

We use coupling to study the time taken until the distribution of a statistic on a Markov chain is close to its stationary distribution. Coupling is a common technique used to obtain upper bounds on mixing times of Markov chains, and we…

We study a simple Markov chain, the switch chain, on the set of all perfect matchings in a bipartite graph. This Markov chain was proposed by Diaconis, Graham and Holmes as a possible approach to a sampling problem arising in Statistics. We…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…