English

Stability of adversarial Markov chains, with an application to adaptive MCMC algorithms

Probability 2016-08-11 v4

Abstract

We consider whether ergodic Markov chains with bounded step size remain bounded in probability when their transitions are modified by an adversary on a bounded subset. We provide counterexamples to show that the answer is no in general, and prove theorems to show that the answer is yes under various additional assumptions. We then use our results to prove convergence of various adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1403.3950,
  title  = {Stability of adversarial Markov chains, with an application to adaptive MCMC algorithms},
  author = {Radu V. Craiu and Lawrence Gray and Krzysztof Łatuszyński and Neal Madras and Gareth O. Roberts and Jeffrey S. Rosenthal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.3950},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AAP1083 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:27:54.038Z