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Foundations of Data Science

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Figure 5.4: A network with a constriction.<br />

and leads to polynomial time bounded algorithm to estimate the volume <strong>of</strong> any convex<br />

set in R d .<br />

5.4 Convergence <strong>of</strong> Random Walks on Undirected Graphs<br />

The Metropolis-Hasting algorithm and Gibbs sampling both involve a random walk.<br />

Initial states <strong>of</strong> the walk are highly dependent on the start state <strong>of</strong> the walk. Both<br />

these walks are random walks on edge-weighted undirected graphs. Such Markov chains<br />

are derived from electrical networks. Recall the following notation which we will use<br />

throughout this section. Given a network <strong>of</strong> resistors, the conductance <strong>of</strong> edge (x, y)<br />

is denoted c xy and the normalizing constant c x equals ∑ y c xy. The Markov chain has<br />

transition probabilities p xy = c xy /c x . We assume the chain is connected. Since<br />

c x p xy = c xy = c yx = c y c yx /c y = c y p xy<br />

the stationary probabilities are proportional to c x where the normalization constant is<br />

c 0 = ∑ x c x.<br />

An important question is how fast the walk starts to reflect the stationary probability<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Markov process. If the convergence time was proportional to the number <strong>of</strong> states,<br />

the algorithms would not be very useful since the number <strong>of</strong> states can be exponentially<br />

large.<br />

There are clear examples <strong>of</strong> connected chains that take a long time to converge. A<br />

chain with a constriction, see Figure 5.4, takes a long time to converge since the walk is<br />

unlikely to reach the narrow passage between the two halves, both <strong>of</strong> which are reasonably<br />

big. We will show in Theorem 5.5 that the time to converge is quantitatively related to<br />

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