A random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is excited if the first time it visits a vertex there is a bias in one direction, but on subsequent visits to that vertex the walker picks a neighbor uniformly at random. We show that…

We show how the evolving set methodology of Morris and Peres can be used to show Cheeger inequalities for bounding the spectral gap of a finite Markov kernel. This leads to sharp versions of several previous Cheeger inequalities, including ones…

We develop singular value techniques in the context of time inhomogeneous finite Markov chains with the goal of obtaining quantitative results concerning the asymptotic behavior of such chains. We introduce the notion of c-stability which can be viewed as a…

In this paper we investigate three types of convergence for geometrically ergodic Markov chains (MCs) with countable state space, which in general lead to different `rates of convergence'. For reversible Markov chains it is shown that these rates coincide. For…

We consider moments of the return times (or first hitting times) in an irreducible discrete time discrete space Markov chain. It is classical that the finiteness of the first moment of a return time of one state implies the finiteness…

Consider a deck of n cards. Let $p_1,p_2,\ldots,p_n$ be a probability vector and consider the mixing time of the card shuffle which at each step of time picks a position according to the pi 's and move the card in…