Exact thresholds for Ising–Gibbs samplers on general graphs

Date

2013

Authors

Mossel, Elchanan
Sly, Allan

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Abstract

We establish tight results for rapid mixing of Gibbs samplers for the Ferromagnetic Ising model on general graphs. We show that if (d − 1)tanhβ < 1, then there exists a constant C such that the discrete time mixing time of Gibbs samplers for the ferromagnetic Ising model on any graph of n vertices and maximal degree d, where all interactions are bounded by β, and arbitrary external fields are bounded by Cn log n. Moreover, the spectral gap is uniformly bounded away from 0 for all such graphs, as well as for infinite graphs of maximal degree d. We further show that when d tanhβ < 1, with high probability over the Erdos–Rényi random graph G(n, d/n), it holds that the mixing time of Gibbs samplers is n¹⁺ᶱ(1/log log n). Both results are tight, as it is known that the mixing time for random regular and Erdos–Rényi random graphs is, with high probability, exponential ˝ in n when (d − 1)tanhβ > 1, and d tanhβ > 1, respectively. To our knowledge our results give the first tight sufficient conditions for rapid mixing of spin systems on general graphs. Moreover, our results are the first rigorous results establishing exact thresholds for dynamics on random graphs in terms of spatial thresholds on trees.

Description

Keywords

Keywords: Glauber dynamics; Ising model; Phase transition

Citation

Source

The Annals of Probability

Type

Journal article

Book Title

Entity type

Access Statement

Open Access

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