Stable Adiabatic Times for Markov Chains

TL;DR

This paper extends the concept of adiabatic time from quantum systems to time-inhomogeneous Markov chains, providing a sufficient condition for stable adiabatic evolution and establishing an upper bound involving the mixing time.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-inspired framework for analyzing the adiabatic time of Markov chains and derives an explicit bound based on mixing times.

Findings

Stable adiabatic time is bounded by a function of the mixing time.

The bound is $O(t_{mix}^4 / \epsilon^3)$ for the adiabatic evolution.

The approach parallels quantum adiabatic theorems for Markov processes.

Abstract

In this paper we continue our work on adiabatic time of time-inhomogeneous Markov chains first introduced in Kovchegov (2010) and Bradford and Kovchegov (2011). Our study is an analog to the well-known Quantum Adiabatic (QA) theorem which characterizes the quantum adiabatic time for the evolution of a quantum system as a result of applying of a series of Hamilton operators, each is a linear combination of two given initial and final Hamilton operators, i.e. $\mathbf{H}(s) = (1-s)\mathbf{H_0} + s\mathbf{H_1}$. Informally, the quantum adiabatic time of a quantum system specifies the speed at which the Hamiltonian operators changes so that the ground state of the system at any time $s$ will always remain $\epsilon$-close to that induced by the Hamilton operator $\mathbf{H}(s)$ at time $s$. Analogously, we derive a sufficient condition for the stable adiabatic time of a time-inhomogeneous Markov evolution specified by applying a series of transition probability matrices, each is a linear combination of two given irreducible and aperiodic transition probability matrices, i.e., $\mathbf{P_{t}} = (1-t)\mathbf{P_{0}} + t\mathbf{P_{1}}$. In particular we show that the stable adiabatic time $t_{sad}(\mathbf{P_{0}}, \mathbf{P_{1}}, \epsilon) = O (t_{mix}^{4}(\epsilon \slash 2) \slash \epsilon^{3}), $ where $t_{mix}$ denotes the maximum mixing time over all $\mathbf{P_{t}}$ for $0 \leq t \leq 1$.