Intersection conductance and canonical alternating paths, methods for general finite Markov chains

Abstract

We extend the conductance and canonical paths methods to the setting of general finite Markov chains, including non-reversible non-lazy walks. The new path method is used to show that a known bound for mixing time of a lazy walk on a Cayley graph with symmetric generating set also applies to the non-lazy non-symmetric case, often even when there is no holding probability.