Locally Stationary Distributions: A Framework for Analyzing Slow-Mixing Markov Chains

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Kuikui, Mohanty, Sidhanth, Raghavendra, Prasad, Rajaraman, Amit, Wu, David X.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913928364163072
author Liu, Kuikui
Mohanty, Sidhanth
Raghavendra, Prasad
Rajaraman, Amit
Wu, David X.
author_facet Liu, Kuikui
Mohanty, Sidhanth
Raghavendra, Prasad
Rajaraman, Amit
Wu, David X.
contents Many natural Markov chains fail to mix to their stationary distribution in polynomially many steps. Often, this slow mixing is inevitable since it is computationally intractable to sample from their stationary measure. Nevertheless, Markov chains can be shown to always converge quickly to measures that are locally stationary, i.e., measures that don't change over a small number of steps. These locally stationary measures are analogous to local minima in continuous optimization, while stationary measures correspond to global minima. While locally stationary measures can be statistically far from stationary measures, do they enjoy provable theoretical guarantees that have algorithmic implications? We study this question in this work and demonstrate three algorithmic applications of locally stationary measures: 1. We show that Glauber dynamics on the hardcore model can be used to find independent sets of size $Ω\left(\frac{\log d}{d} \cdot n\right)$ in triangle-free graphs of degree at most $d$. 2. Let $W$ be a symmetric real matrix with bounded spectral diameter and $v$ be a unit vector. Given the matrix $M = λvv^\top + W$ with a planted rank-one spike along vector $v$, for sufficiently large constant $λ$, Glauber dynamics on the Ising model defined by $M$ samples vectors $x \in \{\pm 1\}^n$ that have constant correlation with the vector $v$. 3. Let $M = A_{\mathbf{G}} - \frac{d}{n}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ be a centered version of the adjacency matrix where the graph $\mathbf{G}$ is drawn from a sparse 2-community stochastic block model. We show that for sufficiently large constant signal-to-noise ratio, Glauber dynamics on the Ising model defined by $M$ samples vectors $x \in \{\pm 1\}^n$ that have constant correlation with the hidden community vector $\mathbfσ$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20849
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Locally Stationary Distributions: A Framework for Analyzing Slow-Mixing Markov Chains
Liu, Kuikui
Mohanty, Sidhanth
Raghavendra, Prasad
Rajaraman, Amit
Wu, David X.
Data Structures and Algorithms
Probability
Many natural Markov chains fail to mix to their stationary distribution in polynomially many steps. Often, this slow mixing is inevitable since it is computationally intractable to sample from their stationary measure. Nevertheless, Markov chains can be shown to always converge quickly to measures that are locally stationary, i.e., measures that don't change over a small number of steps. These locally stationary measures are analogous to local minima in continuous optimization, while stationary measures correspond to global minima. While locally stationary measures can be statistically far from stationary measures, do they enjoy provable theoretical guarantees that have algorithmic implications? We study this question in this work and demonstrate three algorithmic applications of locally stationary measures: 1. We show that Glauber dynamics on the hardcore model can be used to find independent sets of size $Ω\left(\frac{\log d}{d} \cdot n\right)$ in triangle-free graphs of degree at most $d$. 2. Let $W$ be a symmetric real matrix with bounded spectral diameter and $v$ be a unit vector. Given the matrix $M = λvv^\top + W$ with a planted rank-one spike along vector $v$, for sufficiently large constant $λ$, Glauber dynamics on the Ising model defined by $M$ samples vectors $x \in \{\pm 1\}^n$ that have constant correlation with the vector $v$. 3. Let $M = A_{\mathbf{G}} - \frac{d}{n}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ be a centered version of the adjacency matrix where the graph $\mathbf{G}$ is drawn from a sparse 2-community stochastic block model. We show that for sufficiently large constant signal-to-noise ratio, Glauber dynamics on the Ising model defined by $M$ samples vectors $x \in \{\pm 1\}^n$ that have constant correlation with the hidden community vector $\mathbfσ$.
title Locally Stationary Distributions: A Framework for Analyzing Slow-Mixing Markov Chains
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20849