Assigning Stationary Distributions to Sparse Stochastic Matrices

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gillis, Nicolas, Van Dooren, Paul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Gillis, Nicolas
Van Dooren, Paul
author_facet Gillis, Nicolas
Van Dooren, Paul
contents The target stationary distribution problem (TSDP) is the following: given an irreducible stochastic matrix $G$ and a target stationary distribution $\hat μ$, construct a minimum norm perturbation, $Δ$, such that $\hat G = G+Δ$ is also stochastic and has the prescribed target stationary distribution, $\hat μ$. In this paper, we revisit the TSDP under a constraint on the support of $Δ$, that is, on the set of non-zero entries of $Δ$. This is particularly meaningful in practice since one cannot typically modify all entries of $G$. We first show how to construct a feasible solution $\hat G$ that has essentially the same support as the matrix $G$. Then we show how to compute globally optimal and sparse solutions using the component-wise $\ell_1$ norm and linear optimization. We propose an efficient implementation that relies on a column-generation approach which allows us to solve sparse problems of size up to $10^5 \times 10^5$ in a few minutes. We illustrate the proposed algorithms with several numerical experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_16011
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assigning Stationary Distributions to Sparse Stochastic Matrices
Gillis, Nicolas
Van Dooren, Paul
Numerical Analysis
Optimization and Control
Probability
Computation
The target stationary distribution problem (TSDP) is the following: given an irreducible stochastic matrix $G$ and a target stationary distribution $\hat μ$, construct a minimum norm perturbation, $Δ$, such that $\hat G = G+Δ$ is also stochastic and has the prescribed target stationary distribution, $\hat μ$. In this paper, we revisit the TSDP under a constraint on the support of $Δ$, that is, on the set of non-zero entries of $Δ$. This is particularly meaningful in practice since one cannot typically modify all entries of $G$. We first show how to construct a feasible solution $\hat G$ that has essentially the same support as the matrix $G$. Then we show how to compute globally optimal and sparse solutions using the component-wise $\ell_1$ norm and linear optimization. We propose an efficient implementation that relies on a column-generation approach which allows us to solve sparse problems of size up to $10^5 \times 10^5$ in a few minutes. We illustrate the proposed algorithms with several numerical experiments.
title Assigning Stationary Distributions to Sparse Stochastic Matrices
topic Numerical Analysis
Optimization and Control
Probability
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16011