Spectral gap of sparse bistochastic matrices with exchangeable rows with application to shuffle-and-fold maps

Abstract

We consider a random bistochastic matrix of size $n$ of the form $M Q$ where $M$ is a uniformly distributed permutation matrix and $Q$ is a given bistochastic matrix. Under mild sparsity and regularity assumptions on $Q$, we prove that the second largest eigenvalue of $MQ$ is essentially bounded by the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt norm of $Q$ when $n$ grows large. We apply this result to random walks on random regular digraphs and to shuffle-and-fold maps of the unit interval popularized in fluid mixing protocols.