Related papers: The birthday problem and Markov chain Monte Carlo
The basic question in perturbation analysis of Markov chains is: how do small changes in the transition kernels of Markov chains translate to chains in their stationary distributions? Many papers on the subject have shown, roughly, that the…
We define an analog of Plancherel measure for the set of rooted unlabeled trees on n vertices, and a Markov chain which has this measure as its stationary distribution. Using the combinatorics of commutation relations, we show that order…
This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
We propose a Markov chain simulation method to generate simple connected random graphs with a specified degree sequence and level of clustering. The networks generated by our algorithm are random in all other respects and can thus serve as…
Generating random variates from high-dimensional distributions is often done approximately using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In certain cases, perfect simulation algorithms exist that allow one to draw exactly from the stationary…
We consider quantile estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo and establish conditions under which the sampling distribution of the Monte Carlo error is approximately Normal. Further, we investigate techniques to estimate the associated…
A Monte Carlo method for computing the action of a matrix exponential for a certain class of matrices on a vector is proposed. The method is based on generating random paths, which evolve through the indices of the matrix, governed by a…
Monte Carlo algorithms often aim to draw from a distribution $\pi$ by simulating a Markov chain with transition kernel $P$ such that $\pi$ is invariant under $P$. However, there are many situations for which it is impractical or impossible…
We show a Birthday Paradox for self-intersections of Markov chains with uniform stationary distribution. As an application, we analyze Pollard's Rho algorithm for finding the discrete logarithm in a cyclic group $G$ and find that if the…
Elliptical slice sampling, when adapted to linearly truncated multivariate normal distributions, is a rejection-free Markov chain Monte Carlo method. At its core, it requires analytically constructing an ellipse-polytope intersection. The…
A classical problem for Markov chains is determining their stationary (or steady-state) distribution. This problem has an equally classical solution based on eigenvectors and linear equation systems. However, this approach does not scale to…
We consider local Markov chain Monte-Carlo algorithms for sampling from the weighted distribution of independent sets with activity $\l$, where the weight of an independent set $I$ is $\l^{|I|}$. A recent result has established that Gibbs…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods such as Gibbs sampling and simple forms of the Metropolis algorithm typically move about the distribution being sampled via a random walk. For the complex, high-dimensional distributions commonly encountered…
We study the large-scale dynamics of event chain Monte Carlo algorithms in one dimension, and their relation to the true self-avoiding walk. In particular, we study the influence of stress, and different forms of interaction on the…
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given…
We present several Monte Carlo strategies for simulating discrete-time Markov chains with continuous multi-dimensional state space; we focus on stratified techniques. We first analyze the variance of the calculation of the measure of a…
We propose a new approach for estimating the finite dimensional transition matrix of a Markov chain using a large number of independent sample paths observed at random times. The sample paths may be observed as few as two times, and the…
We construct a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method on finite states with optimal choices of acceptance-rejection ratio functions. We prove that the constructed continuous time Markov jumping process has a global in-time convergence rate in…
Markov chain Monte Calro methods (MCMC) are commonly used in Bayesian statistics. In the last twenty years, many results have been established for the calculation of the exact convergence rate of MCMC methods. We introduce another rate of…
The convergence rate of a Markov chain to its stationary distribution is typically assessed using the concept of total variation mixing time. However, this worst-case measure often yields pessimistic estimates and is challenging to infer…