Title
Aggregation of Markov chains: an analysis of deterministic annealing based methods
Abstract
We develop a method for aggregating large Markov chains into smaller representative Markov chains, where Markov chains are viewed as weighted directed graphs, and similar nodes (and edges) are aggregated using a deterministic annealing approach. The notions of representativeness of the aggregated graphs and similarity between nodes in graphs are based on a newly proposed metric that quantifies connectivity in the underlying graph. Namely, we develop notions of distance between subchains in Markov chains, and provide easily verifiable conditions that determine if a given Markov chain is nearly decomposable, that is, conditions for which the deterministic annealing approach can be used to identify subchains with high probability. We show that the aggregated Markov chain preserves certain dynamics of the original chain. In particular we provide explicit bounds on the ℓ1 norm of the error between the aggregated stationary distribution of the original Markov chain and the stationary distribution of the aggregated Markov chain, which extends on longstanding foundational results (Simon and Ando, 1961).
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/CDC.2014.7040423
CDC
Keywords
Field
DocType
optimisation,statistical distributions,original markov chain stationary distribution aggregation,similarity,deterministic annealing based methods,ℓ1 norm,aggregated markov chain stationary distribution aggregation,aggregated graphs,similar node aggregation,weighted directed graphs,distance notion development,directed graphs,deterministic algorithms,markov processes,subchain identification
Discrete mathematics,Markov chain mixing time,Mathematical optimization,Additive Markov chain,Markov property,Markov model,Computer science,Markov chain,Variable-order Markov model,Markov renewal process,Examples of Markov chains
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0743-1546
1
0.34
References 
Authors
8
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunwen Xu1253.26
Carolyn L. Beck240160.19
Srinivasa M. Salapaka36316.55