Weiming Feng

On Deterministically Approximating Total Variation Distance

2023 · arXiv (Cornell University)

Total variation distance (TV distance) is an important measure for the difference between two distributions. Recently, there has been progress in approximating the TV distance between product distributions: a deterministic algorithm for a restricted class …

Rapid Mixing of the Flip Chain over Non-Crossing Spanning Trees

2024 · arXiv (Cornell University)

We show that the flip chain for non-crossing spanning trees of $n+1$ points in convex position mixes in time $O(n^8\log n)$. We use connections between Fuss-Catalan structures to construct a comparison argument with a chain …