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An SVD approach to identifying meta-stable states of Markov chains
Fritzsche, David; Mehrmann, Volker; Szyld, Daniel; Virnik, Elena
Preprint-Reihe des Instituts für Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin
Being one of the key tools in conformation dynamics, the identification of meta-stable states of Markov chains has been subject to extensive research in recent years, especially when the Markov chains represent energy states of biomolecules. Some previous work on this topic involved the computation of the eigenvalue cluster close to one, as well as the corresponding eigenvectors and the stationary probability distribution of the associated stochastic matrix. Later, since the eigenvalue cluster algorithm turned out to be non-robust, an optimisation approach was developed. As a possible less costly alternative, we present an SVD approach to identifying meta-stable states of a stochastic matrix, where we only need the second largest singular vector. We outline some theoretical background and discuss the advantages of this strategy. Some simulated and real numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
