Related papers: Separation cut-offs for birth and death chains
The cutoff phenomenon describes a case where a Markov chain exhibits a sharp transition in its convergence to stationarity. In 1996, Diaconis surveyed this phenomenon, and asked how one could recognize its occurrence in families of finite…
For birth and death chains, we derive bounds on the spectral gap and mixing time in terms of birth and death rates. Together with the results of Ding et al. in 2010, this provides a criterion for the existence of a cutoff in terms of the…
Earlier work by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste gives a spectral criterion for a maximum separation cutoff to occur for birth and death chains. Ding, Lubetzky and Peres gave a related criterion for a maximum total variation cutoff to occur in the…
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…
A sequence of Markov chains is said to exhibit (total variation) cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is abrupt. We consider reversible lazy chains. We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the…
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…
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…
Given a sequence $(\mathfrak{X}_i, \mathscr{K}_i)_{i=1}^\infty$ of Markov chains, the cut-off phenomenon describes a period of transition to stationarity which is asymptotically lower order than the mixing time. We study mixing times and…
We make a connection between the continuous time and lazy discrete time Markov chains through the comparison of cutoffs and mixing time in total variation distance. For illustration, we consider finite birth and death chains and provide a…
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…
We study convergence to equilibrium for a large class of Markov chains in random environment. The chains are sparse in the sense that in every row of the transition matrix $P$ the mass is essentially concentrated on few entries. Moreover,…
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…
Consider a sequence of continuous-time irreducible reversible Markov chains and a sequence of initial distributions, $\mu_n$. The sequence is said to exhibit $\mu_n$-cutoff if the convergence to stationarity in total variation distance is…
Markov chains have long been used for generating random variates from spatial point processes. Broadly speaking, these chains fall into two categories: Metropolis-Hastings type chains running in discrete time and spatial birth-death chains…
We survey recent results concerning the total-variation mixing time of the simple exclusion process on the segment (symmetric and asymmetric) and a continuum analog, the simple random walk on the simplex with an emphasis on cutoff results.…
We investigate the mixing properties of a finite Markov chain in random environment defined as a mixture of a deterministic chain and a chain whose state space has been permuted uniformly at random. This work is the counterpart of a…
The cutoff phenomenon describes the case when an abrupt transition occurs in the convergence of a Markov chain to its equilibrium measure. There are various metrics which can be used to measure the distance to equilibrium, each of which…
Let $(X_t)_{t = 0 }^{\infty}$ be an irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chain on a finite state space $\Omega $. Denote its transition matrix by $P$. To avoid periodicity issues (and thus ensuring convergence to equilibrium) one…
For any distribution $\pi$ with support equal to $[n] = \{1, 2,..., n \}$, we study the set $\mathcal{A}_{\pi}$ of tridiagonal stochastic matrices $K$ satisfying $\pi(i) K[i,j] = \pi(j) K[j,i]$ for all $i, j \in [n]$. These matrices…
We consider families of discrete time birth and death chains on trees, and show that in presence of a drift towards the root of the tree, the chains exhibit cut-off behavior along the drift and escape behavior in the opposite direction.