Mixing Times of Lozenge Tiling and Card Shuffling Markov Chains

We show how to combine Fourier analysis with coupling arguments to bound the mixing times of a variety of Markov chains. The mixing time is the number of steps a Markov chain takes to approach its equilibrium distribution. One application is to a class of Markov chains introduced by Luby, Randall an...

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Veröffentlicht in:The Annals of applied probability 2004-02, Vol.14 (1), p.274-325
1. Verfasser: Wilson, David Bruce
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:We show how to combine Fourier analysis with coupling arguments to bound the mixing times of a variety of Markov chains. The mixing time is the number of steps a Markov chain takes to approach its equilibrium distribution. One application is to a class of Markov chains introduced by Luby, Randall and Sinclair to generate random tilings of regions by lozenges. For an l x l region we bound the mixing time by$O({\cal}l^4 log {\cal}l)$, which improves on the previous bound of$O({\cal}l^7)$, and we show the new bound to be essentially tight. In another application we resolve a few questions raised by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste by lower bounding the mixing time of various card-shuffling Markov chains. Our lower bounds are within a constant factor of their upper bounds. When we use our methods to modify a path-coupling analysis of Bubley and Dyer, we obtain an$O(n^3 logn)$upper bound on the mixing time of the Karzanov-Khachiyan Markov chain for linear extensions.
ISSN:1050-5164
2168-8737
DOI:10.1214/aoap/1075828054