Title
Time Dependent Biased Random Walks
Abstract
AbstractWe study the biased random walk where at each step of a random walk a “controller” can, with a certain small probability, move the walk to an arbitrary neighbour. This model was introduced by Azar et al. [STOC’1992]; we extend their work to the time dependent setting and consider cover times of this walk. We obtain new bounds on the cover and hitting times. Azar et al. conjectured that the controller can increase the stationary probability of a vertex from p to p1-ε; while this conjecture is not true in full generality, we propose a best-possible amended version of this conjecture and confirm it for a broad class of graphs. We also consider the problem of computing an optimal strategy for the controller to minimise the cover time and show that for directed graphs determining the cover time is PSPACE-complete.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3498848
ACM Transactions on Algorithms
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Random walk, cover time, Markov chain, Markov decision process, PSPACE
Journal
18
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1549-6325
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John Haslegrave1295.74
Thomas Sauerwald257539.99
Sylvester John300.34