Related papers: The birthday problem and Markov chain Monte Carlo
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…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
In this paper a method based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is proposed to compute the probability of a rare event. The conditional distribution of the underlying process given that the rare event occurs has the probability…
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…
Approximating the stationary probability of a state in a Markov chain through Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques is, in general, inefficient. Standard random walk approaches require $\tilde{O}(\tau/\pi(v))$ operations to approximate the…
In this paper, we consider the Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for random sampling of combinatorial objects. The running time of such an algorithm depends on the total mixing time of the underlying Markov chain and is unknown in…
Most approximation algorithms for #P-complete problems (e.g., evaluating the permanent of a matrix or the volume of a polytope) work by reduction to the problem of approximate sampling from a distribution $\pi$ over a large set $\S$. This…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected time to find a maximum degree node on a graph using a (parameterized) biased random walk. For assortative graphs the positive degree correlation serves as a local gradient for which a bias…
We discuss a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure for the random sampling of some one-dimensional lattice paths with constraints, for various constraints. We show that an approach inspired by optimal transport allows us to bound…
We study continuous time Markov processes on graphs. The notion of frequency is introduced, which serves well as a scaling factor between any Markov time of a continuous time Markov process and that of its jump chain. As an application, we…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
This paper presents a novel theoretical Monte Carlo Markov chain procedure in the framework of graphs. It specifically deals with the construction of a Markov chain whose empirical distribution converges to a given reference one. The Markov…
Markov chains are convenient means of generating realizations of networks with a given (joint or otherwise) degree distribution, since they simply require a procedure for rewiring edges. The major challenge is to find the right number of…
In this paper, we present a novel iterative Monte Carlo method for approximating the stationary probability of a single state of a positive recurrent Markov chain. We utilize the characterization that the stationary probability of a state…
We show that the classical Pollard rho algorithm for discrete logarithms produces a collision in expected time O(sqrt(n)(log n)^3). This is the first nontrivial rigorous estimate for the collision probability for the unaltered Pollard rho…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a widely-used technique for generating a dependent sequence of samples from complex distributions. Conventionally, these methods require a source of independent random variates. Most implementations use…
How to enable efficient analytics over such data has been an increasingly important research problem. Given the sheer size of such social networks, many existing studies resort to sampling techniques that draw random nodes from an online…
We study the worst-case communication complexity of distributed algorithms computing a path problem based on stationary distributions of random walks in a network $G$ with the caveat that $G$ is also the communication network. The problem…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
An algorithm observes the trajectories of random walks over an unknown graph $G$, starting from the same vertex $x$, as well as the degrees along the trajectories. For all finite connected graphs, one can estimate the number of edges $m$ up…