Construction of an irreducible Markov chain in the Ising model

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Construction of an irreducible Markov chain in the Ising model is a mathematical method to prove results.

In applied

goodness-of-fit test
for the finite Ising model.

The Ising model is used to study magnetic phase transitions and is one of the models of interacting systems.[1]

Markov bases

Every integer vector , can be uniquely written as , where and are non-negative vectors. A Markov basis for the Ising model is a set of integer vectors such that:

(i) For all , there must be and .

(ii) For any and any , there always exist satisfy:

and

for l=1,...,k.

The element of is moved. Then, by using the

aperiodic, reversible and irreducible Markov Chain
.

The paper "Algebraic algorithms for sampling from conditional distributions", published by Persi Diaconis and Bernd Sturmfels in 1998,[2] shows that a Markov basis can be defined algebraically as an Ising model. According to the paper, any generating set for the ideal is a Markov basis for the Ising model.

Construction of an irreducible Markov Chain

Without modifying the algorithm mentioned in the paper, it is impossible to get uniform samples from , otherwise leading to inaccurate p-values.[3]

A simple swap is defined as of the form , where is the canonical basis vector of . Simple swaps change the states of two lattice points in y.

Z denotes the set of sample swaps. Then two configurations are -connected by Z, if there is a path between and in consisting of simple swaps , which means there exists such that:

with

for

The algorithm can now be described as:

(i) Start with the Markov chain in a configuration

(ii) Select uniformly at random and let .

(iii) Accept if ; otherwise remain in y.

Although the resulting Markov Chain possibly cannot leave the initial state, the problem does not arise for a 1-dimensional Ising model. In higher dimensions, we can overcome this problem by using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in the smallest expanded sample space .

Irreducibility in the 1-dimensional Ising model

The proof of

irreducibility in the 1-dimensional Ising model requires two lemmas
.

Lemma 1:The max-singleton configuration of for the 1-dimension Ising model is unique(up to location of its connected components) and consists of singletons and one connected components of size .

Lemma 2:For and , let denote the unique max-singleton configuration. There exists a sequence such that:

and

for

Since is the smallest expanded sample space which contains , any two configurations in can be connected by simple swaps Z without leaving . This is proved by Lemma 2, so one can achieve the irreducibility of a Markov chain based on simple swaps for the 1-dimension Ising model.

It is also possible to get the same conclusion for a dimension 2 or higher Ising model using the same steps outlined above.

References