Quantum Speedup for Nonreversible Markov Chains

Quantum algorithms can potentially solve a handful of problems more efficiently than their classical counterparts. In that context, it has been discussed that Markov chains problems could be solved significantly faster using quantum computing. Indeed, previous work suggests that quantum computers could accelerate sampling from the stationary distribution of reversible Markov chains. However, in practice, certain physical processes of interest are nonreversible in the probabilistic sense and reversible Markov chains can sometimes be replaced by more efficient nonreversible chains targeting the same stationary distribution. This study uses modern quantum algorithmic techniques and Markov chain theory to sample from the stationary distribution of nonreversible Markov chains with faster worst-case runtime and without requiring the stationary distribution to be computed up to a multiplicative constant. Such an up-to-exponential quantum speedup goes beyond the predicted quadratic quantum acceleration for reversible chains and is likely to have a decisive impact on many applications ranging from statistics and machine learning to computational modeling in physics, chemistry, biology and finance.