Aggregation of markov chains: An analysis of deterministic annealing based methods

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control,CDC 2014
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6591-6596
Number of pages6
EditionFebruary
ISBN (Electronic)9781479977468
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event2014 53rd IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2014 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Dec 15 2014Dec 17 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control
NumberFebruary
Volume2015-February
ISSN (Print)0743-1546
ISSN (Electronic)2576-2370

Other

Other2014 53rd IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period12/15/1412/17/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Control and Optimization

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