Speeding up random walk mixing by starting from a uniform vertex

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Díaz, Alberto Espuny, Morris, Patrick, Perarnau, Guillem, Serra, Oriol
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Díaz, Alberto Espuny
Morris, Patrick
Perarnau, Guillem
Serra, Oriol
author_facet Díaz, Alberto Espuny
Morris, Patrick
Perarnau, Guillem
Serra, Oriol
contents The theory of rapid mixing random walks plays a fundamental role in the study of modern randomised algorithms. Usually, the mixing time is measured with respect to the worst initial position. It is well known that the presence of bottlenecks in a graph hampers mixing and, in particular, starting inside a small bottleneck significantly slows down the diffusion of the walk in the first steps of the process. The average mixing time is defined to be the mixing time starting at a uniformly random vertex and hence is not sensitive to the slow diffusion caused by these bottlenecks. In this paper we provide a general framework to show logarithmic average mixing time for random walks on graphs with small bottlenecks. The framework is especially effective on certain families of random graphs with heterogeneous properties. We demonstrate its applicability on two random models for which the mixing time was known to be of order $(\log n)^2$, speeding up the mixing to order $\log n$. First, in the context of smoothed analysis on connected graphs, we show logarithmic average mixing time for randomly perturbed graphs of bounded degeneracy. A particular instance is the Newman-Watts small-world model. Second, we show logarithmic average mixing time for supercritically percolated expander graphs. When the host graph is complete, this application gives an alternative proof that the average mixing time of the giant component in the supercritical Erdős-Rényi graph is logarithmic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2208_07462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speeding up random walk mixing by starting from a uniform vertex
Díaz, Alberto Espuny
Morris, Patrick
Perarnau, Guillem
Serra, Oriol
Probability
Discrete Mathematics
Combinatorics
The theory of rapid mixing random walks plays a fundamental role in the study of modern randomised algorithms. Usually, the mixing time is measured with respect to the worst initial position. It is well known that the presence of bottlenecks in a graph hampers mixing and, in particular, starting inside a small bottleneck significantly slows down the diffusion of the walk in the first steps of the process. The average mixing time is defined to be the mixing time starting at a uniformly random vertex and hence is not sensitive to the slow diffusion caused by these bottlenecks. In this paper we provide a general framework to show logarithmic average mixing time for random walks on graphs with small bottlenecks. The framework is especially effective on certain families of random graphs with heterogeneous properties. We demonstrate its applicability on two random models for which the mixing time was known to be of order $(\log n)^2$, speeding up the mixing to order $\log n$. First, in the context of smoothed analysis on connected graphs, we show logarithmic average mixing time for randomly perturbed graphs of bounded degeneracy. A particular instance is the Newman-Watts small-world model. Second, we show logarithmic average mixing time for supercritically percolated expander graphs. When the host graph is complete, this application gives an alternative proof that the average mixing time of the giant component in the supercritical Erdős-Rényi graph is logarithmic.
title Speeding up random walk mixing by starting from a uniform vertex
topic Probability
Discrete Mathematics
Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07462