A signed generalization of the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model

Abstract

We bound the rate of convergence to stationarity for a signed generalization of the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model; this signed generalization is a Markov chain on the homogeneous space (Z_2 \wr S_n) / (S_r \times S_{n-r}). Specifically, for r not too far from n/2, we determine that, to first order in n, 1/4 n \log n steps are both necessary and sufficient for total variation distance to become small. Moreover, for r not too far from n/2, we show that our signed generalization also exhibits the ``cutoff phenomenon.''