Exponential concentration inequalities for additive functionals of Markov chains

Adamczak, Radosław; Bednorz, Witold

ESAIM: Probability and Statistics, Tome 19 (2015), pp. 440-481.

Using the renewal approach we prove exponential inequalities for additive functionals and empirical processes of ergodic Markov chains, thus obtaining counterparts of inequalities for sums of independent random variables. The inequalities do not require functions of the chain to be bounded and moreover all the involved constants are given by explicit formulas whenever the usual drift condition holds, which may be of interest in practical applications e.g. to MCMC algorithms.

Classification : 60E15, 60J20, 60K05, 65C05
Mots clés : Markov chains, exponential inequalities, drift criteria

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