Rates of convergence of some multivariate Markov chains with polynomial eigenfunctions

Abstract

We provide a sharp nonasymptotic analysis of the rates of convergence for some standard multivariate Markov chains using spectral techniques. All chains under consideration have multivariate orthogonal polynomial as eigenfunctions. Our examples include the Moran model in population genetics and its variants in community ecology, the Dirichlet-multinomial Gibbs sampler, a class of generalized Bernoulli--Laplace processes, a generalized Ehrenfest urn model and the multivariate normal autoregressive process.