Comparison of asymptotic variances of inhomogeneous Markov chains with application to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods
In this paper, we study the asymptotic variance of sample path averages for inhomogeneous Markov chains that evolve alternatingly according to two different $\pi$-reversible Markov transition kernels $P$ and $Q$. More specifically, our main result allows us to compare directly the asymptotic variances of two inhomogeneous Markov chains associated with different kernels $P_{i}$ and $Q_{i}$, $i\in\{0,1\}$, as soon as the kernels of each pair $(P_{0},P_{1})$ and $(Q_{0},Q_{1})$…