Markov chain stationary distributions with scipy.sparse?

Question

I have a Markov chain given as a large sparse scipy matrix A. (I\'ve constructed the matrix in scipy.sparse.dok_matrix format, but con

Answer 1

Several articles with summaries of possible approaches can be found with Google scholar, here's one: http://www.ima.umn.edu/preprints/pp1992/932.pdf

What's done below is a combination of the suggestion by @Helge Dietert above on splitting to strongly connected components first, and approach #4 in the paper linked above.

import numpy as np
import time

# NB. Scipy >= 0.14.0 probably required
import scipy
from scipy.sparse.linalg import gmres, spsolve
from scipy.sparse import csgraph
from scipy import sparse 


def markov_stationary_components(P, tol=1e-12):
    """
    Split the chain first to connected components, and solve the
    stationary state for the smallest one
    """
    n = P.shape[0]

    # 0. Drop zero edges
    P = P.tocsr()
    P.eliminate_zeros()

    # 1. Separate to connected components
    n_components, labels = csgraph.connected_components(P, directed=True, connection='strong')

    # The labels also contain decaying components that need to be skipped
    index_sets = []
    for j in range(n_components):
        indices = np.flatnonzero(labels == j)
        other_indices = np.flatnonzero(labels != j)

        Px = P[indices,:][:,other_indices]
        if Px.max() == 0:
            index_sets.append(indices)
    n_components = len(index_sets)

    # 2. Pick the smallest one
    sizes = [indices.size for indices in index_sets]
    min_j = np.argmin(sizes)
    indices = index_sets[min_j]

    print("Solving for component {0}/{1} of size {2}".format(min_j, n_components, indices.size))

    # 3. Solve stationary state for it
    p = np.zeros(n)
    if indices.size == 1:
        # Simple case
        p[indices] = 1
    else:
        p[indices] = markov_stationary_one(P[indices,:][:,indices], tol=tol)

    return p


def markov_stationary_one(P, tol=1e-12, direct=False):
    """
    Solve stationary state of Markov chain by replacing the first
    equation by the normalization condition.
    """
    if P.shape == (1, 1):
        return np.array([1.0])

    n = P.shape[0]
    dP = P - sparse.eye(n)
    A = sparse.vstack([np.ones(n), dP.T[1:,:]])
    rhs = np.zeros((n,))
    rhs[0] = 1

    if direct:
        # Requires that the solution is unique
        return spsolve(A, rhs)
    else:
        # GMRES does not care whether the solution is unique or not, it
        # will pick the first one it finds in the Krylov subspace
        p, info = gmres(A, rhs, tol=tol)
        if info != 0:
            raise RuntimeError("gmres didn't converge")
        return p


def main():
    # Random transition matrix (connected)
    n = 100000
    np.random.seed(1234)
    P = sparse.rand(n, n, 1e-3) + sparse.eye(n)
    P = P + sparse.diags([1, 1], [-1, 1], shape=P.shape)

    # Disconnect several components
    P = P.tolil()
    P[:1000,1000:] = 0
    P[1000:,:1000] = 0

    P[10000:11000,:10000] = 0
    P[10000:11000,11000:] = 0
    P[:10000,10000:11000] = 0
    P[11000:,10000:11000] = 0

    # Normalize
    P = P.tocsr()
    P = P.multiply(sparse.csr_matrix(1/P.sum(1).A))

    print("*** Case 1")
    doit(P)

    print("*** Case 2")
    P = sparse.csr_matrix(np.array([[1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0],
                                    [0.5, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0],
                                    [0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5],
                                    [0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5]]))
    doit(P)

def doit(P):
    assert isinstance(P, sparse.csr_matrix)
    assert np.isfinite(P.data).all()

    print("Construction finished!")

    def check_solution(method):
        print("\n\n-- {0}".format(method.__name__))
        start = time.time()
        p = method(P)
        print("time: {0}".format(time.time() - start))
        print("error: {0}".format(np.linalg.norm(P.T.dot(p) - p)))
        print("min(p)/max(p): {0}, {1}".format(p.min(), p.max()))
        print("sum(p): {0}".format(p.sum()))

    check_solution(markov_stationary_components)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

EDIT: spotted a bug --- csgraph.connected_components returns also purely decaying components, which need to be filtered out.