We develop a criterion for transience for a general model of branching Markov chains. In the case of multi-dimensional branching random walk in random environment (BRWRE) this criterion becomes explicit. In particular, we show that \emph{Condition L} of Comets and Popov is necessary and sufficient for transience as conjectured. Furthermore, the criterion applies to two important classes of branching random walks and implies that the critical branching random walk is transient resp. dies out locally.
We establish recurrence and transience criteria for critical branching processes in random environment with immigration. These results are then applied to discuss recurrence and transience of a recurrent random walk in a random environment on Z that will be disturbed by cookies inducing a drift to the right of strength 1.
We give three different criteria for transience of a Branching Markov Chain. These conditions enable us to give a classification of Branching Random Walks in Random Environment (BRWRE) on Cayley Graphs in recurrence and transience. This classification is stated explicitly for BRWRE on $\Z^d.$ Furthermore, we emphasize the interplay between Branching Markov Chains and the spectral radius. We prove properties of the spectral radius of the Random Walk in Random Environment with the help of appropriate Branching Markov Chains.
Consider a sequence of i.i.d. random variables $X_n$ where each random variable is refreshed independently according to a Poisson clock. At any fixed time $t$ the law of the sequence is the same as for the sequence at time 0 but at random times almost sure properties of the sequence may be violated. If there are such \emph{exceptional times} we say that the property is \emph{dynamically sensitive}, otherwise we call it \emph{dynamically stable}. In this note we consider branching random walks on Cayley graphs and prove that recurrence and transience are dynamically stable in the sub-and superc…
We study how the recurrence and transience of space-time sets for a branching random walk on a graph depends on the offspring distribution. Here, we say that a space-time set $A$ is recurrent if it is visited infinitely often almost surely on the event that the branching random walk survives forever, and say that $A$ is transient if it is visited at most finitely often almost surely. We prove that if $μ$ and $ν$ are supercritical offspring distributions with means $\bar μ< \bar ν$ then every space-time set that is recurrent with respect to the offspring distribution $μ$ is also recurrent with …
The question of recurrence and transience of branching Markov chains is more subtle than for ordinary Markov chains; they can be classified in transience, weak recurrence, and strong recurrence. We review criteria for transience and weak recurrence and give several new conditions for weak recurrence and strong recurrence. These conditions make a unified treatment of known and new examples possible and provide enough information to distinguish between weak and strong recurrence. This represents a step towards a general classification of branching Markov chains. In particular, we show that in \e…
We study branching random walks in random i.i.d. environment in $\Z^d, d \geq 1$. For this model, the population size cannot decrease, and a natural definition of recurrence is introduced. We prove a dichotomy for recurrence/transience, depending only on the support of the environmental law. We give sufficient conditions for recurrence and for transience. In the recurrent case, we study the asymptotics of the tail of the distribution of the hitting times and prove a shape theorem for the set of lattice sites which are visited up to a large time.
The motivation for this paper is the study of the phase transition for recurrence/transience of a class of self-interacting random walks on trees, which includes the once-reinforced random walk. For this purpose, we define a quantity, that we call the branching-ruin number of a tree, which provides (in the spirit of Furstenberg, 1970, and Lyons, 1990) a natural way to measure trees with polynomial growth. We prove that the branching-ruin number of a tree is equal to the critical parameter for the recurrence/transience of the once-reinforced random walk. We define a sharp and effective (i.e. co…
We continue our study of critical branching random walk and branching capacity. In this paper we introduce branching recurrence and branching transience and prove an analogous version of Wiener's Test.
The notion of degree and related notions concerning recurrence and transience for a class of L'evy processes on metric Abelian groups are studied. The case of random walks on a hierarchical group is examined with emphasis on the role of the ultrametric structure of the group and on analogies and differences with Euclidean random walks. Applications to separation of time scales and occupation times of multilevel branching systems are discussed.
We characterize recurrence and transience of nonnegative multivariate autoregressive processes of order one with random contractive coefficient matrix, of subcritical multitype Galton-Watson branching processes in random environment with immigration, and of the related max-autoregressive processes and general random exchange processes. Our criterion is given in terms of the maximal Lyapunov exponent of the coefficient matrix and the cumulative distribution function of the innovation/immigration component.
We investigate recurrence and transience of Branching Markov Chains (BMC) in discrete time. Branching Markov Chains are clouds of particles which move (according to an irreducible underlying Markov Chain) and produce offspring independently. The offspring distribution can depend on the location of the particle. If the offspring distribution is constant for all locations, these are Tree-Indexed Markov chains in the sense of \cite{benjamini94}. Starting with one particle at location $x$, we denote by $α(x)$ the probability that $x$ is visited infinitely often by the cloud. Due to the irreducibil…
We study the frog model on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with drift in dimension $d \geq 2$ and establish the existence of transient and recurrent regimes depending on the transition probabilities. We focus on a model in which the particles perform nearest neighbour random walks which are balanced in all but one direction. This gives a model with two parameters. We present conditions on the parameters for recurrence and transience, revealing interesting differences between dimension $d=2$ and dimension $d \geq 3$. Our proofs make use of (refined) couplings with branching random walks for the transience, and …
We introduce a simple technique for proving the transience of certain processes defined on the random tree $\mathcal{G}$ generated by a supercritical branching process. We prove the transience for once-reinforced random walks on $\mathcal{G}$, that is, a generalization of a result of Durrett, Kesten and Limic [Probab. Theory Related Fields 122 (2002) 567--592]. Moreover, we give a new proof for the transience of a family of biased random walks defined on $\mathcal{G}$. Other proofs of this fact can be found in [Ann. Probab. 16 (1988) 1229--1241] and [Ann. Probab. 18 (1990) 931--958] as part of…
We give a criterion for unlimited growth with positive probability for a large class of multidimensional stochastic models. As a by-product, we recover the necessary and sufficient conditions for recurrence and transience for critical multitype Galton-Watson with immigration processes. We also significantly improve some results on multitype size-dependent Galton-Watson processes.
The branching-ruin number of a tree, which describes its asymptotic growth and geometry, can be seen as a polynomial version of the branching number. This quantity was defined by Collevecchio, Kious and Sidoravicius (2018) in order to understand the phase transitions of the once-reinforced random walk (ORRW) on trees. Strikingly, this number was proved to be equal to the critical parameter of ORRW on trees. In this paper, we continue the investigation of the link between the branching-ruin number and the criticality of random processes on trees. First, we study random walks on random conductan…
We consider a left-transient random walk in a random environment on Z that will be disturbed by cookies inducing a drift to the right of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is i.i.d. and independent of the environment. Criteria for recurrence and transience of the random walk are obtained. For this purpose we use subcritical branching processes in random environments with immigration and formulate criteria for recurrence and transience for these processes.
We consider excited random walks on the integers with a bounded number of i.i.d. cookies per site which may induce drifts both to the left and to the right. We extend the criteria for recurrence and transience by M. Zerner and for positivity of speed by A.-L. Basdevant and A. Singh to this case and also prove an annealed central limit theorem. The proofs are based on results from the literature concerning branching processes with migration and make use of a certain renewal structure.
We study the two-dimensional joint distribution of the first hitting time of a constant level by a continuous-state branching process with immigration and their primitive stopped at this time. We show an explicit expression of its Laplace transform. Using this formula, we study the polarity of zero and provide a necessary and sufficient criterion for transience or recurrence. We follow the approach of Shiga, T. (1990) [A recurrence criterion for Markov processes of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. Probability Theory and Related Fields, 85(4), 425-447], by finding some $λ$-invariant functions for the g…
Motivated by the stochastic Lotka-Volterra model, we introduce discrete-state interacting multitype branching processes. We show that they can be obtained as the sum of a multidimensional random walk with a Lamperti-type change proportional to the population size; and a multidimensional Poisson process with a time-change proportional to the pairwise interactions. We define the analogous continuous-state process as the unique strong solution of a multidimensional SDE. We prove that the scaling limits of the discrete-state process correspond to its continuous counterpart. In addition, we show th…
Long-time behaviour of a multidimensional age-dependent branching process with a singular jump kernel modelling telomere shortening
Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse, CNRS, Université de Toulouse（图卢兹数学研究所）；CMAP, CNRS, INRIA, École polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院高等应用数学中心）
In this paper we consider a d-dimensional scenery seen along a simple symmetric branching random walk, where at each time each particle gives the color record it is seeing. We show that we can a.s. reconstruct the scenery up to equivalence from the color record of all the particles. For this we assume that the scenery has at least 2d + 1 colors which are i.i.d. with uniform probability. This is an improvement in comparison to [22] where the particles needed to see at each time a window around their current position. In [11] the reconstruction is done for d = 2 with only one particle instead of…
We study branching random walks in random environment on the $d$-dimensional square lattice, $d \geq 1$. In this model, the environment has finite range dependence, and the population size cannot decrease. We prove limit theorems (laws of large numbers) for the set of lattice sites which are visited up to a large time as well as for the local size of the population. The limiting shape of this set is compact and convex, though the local size is given by a concave growth exponent. Also, we obtain the law of large numbers for the logarithm of the total number of particles in the process.
We consider a continuous-time branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with two types of particles and an infinite number of initial particles. The main results are devoted to the study of the generating function and the limiting behavior of the moments of subpopulations generated by a single particle of each type. We assume that particle types differ from each other not only by the laws of branching, as in multi-type branching processes, but also by the laws of walking. For a critical branching process at each lattice point and recurrent random walk of particles, the effect of limi…
For a supercritical catalytic branching random walk on Z^d (d is positive integer) with an arbitrary finite catalysts set we study the spread of particles population as time grows to infinity. Namely, we divide by t the position coordinates of each particle existing at time t and then let t tend to infinity. It is shown that in the limit there are a.s. no particles outside the closed convex surface in R^d which we call the propagation front and, under condition of infinite number of visits of the catalysts set, a.s. there exist particles on the propagation front. We also demonstrate that the p…
We show that the transience or recurrence of a random walk in certain random environments on an arbitrary infinite locally finite tree is determined by the branching number of the tree, which is a measure of the average number of branches per vertex. This generalizes and unifies previous work of the authors. It also shows that the point of phase transition for edge-reinforced random walk is likewise determined by the branching number of the tree. Finally, we show that the branching number determines the rate of first-passage percolation on trees, also known as the first-birth problem. Our tech…
The recurrence features of persistent random walks built from variable length Markov chains are investigated. We observe that these stochastic processes can be seen as L{é}vy walks for which the persistence times depend on some internal Markov chain: they admit Markov random walk skeletons. A recurrence versus transience dichotomy is highlighted. We first give a sufficient Fourier criterion for the recurrence, close to the usual Chung-Fuchs one, assuming in addition the positive recurrence of the driving chain and a series criterion is derived. The key tool is the Nagaev-Guivarc'h method. Fina…
We consider a multidimensional random walk in a product random environment with bounded steps, transience in some spatial direction, and high enough moments on the regeneration time. We prove an invariance principle, or functional central limit theorem, under almost every environment for the diffusively scaled centered walk. The main point behind the invariance principle is that the quenched mean of the walk behaves subdiffusively.
We study a continuous-time branching random walk on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$, $d\in \mathbb{N}$, with a single source of branching, that is the lattice point where the birth and death of particles can occur. The random walk is assumed to be homogeneous, symmetric and irreducible but, in contrast to previous investigations, the random walk transition intensities $a(x,y)$ decrease as $|y-x|^{-(d+α)}$ for $|y-x|\to \infty$, where $α\in(0,2)$, that leads to an infinite variance of the random walk jumps. The~mechanism of the birth and death of particles at the source is governed by a continuous…
The objective of this paper is the study of the equilibrium behavior of a population on the hierarchical group $Ω_N$ consisting of families of individuals undergoing critical branching random walk and in addition these families also develop according to a critical branching process. Strong transience of the random walk guarantees existence of an equilibrium for this two-level branching system. In the limit $N\to\infty$ (called the hierarchical mean field limit), the equilibrium aggregated populations in a nested sequence of balls $B^{(N)}_\ell$ of hierarchical radius $\ell$ converge to a backw…
We consider a supercritical catalytic branching random walk (CBRW) on a multidimensional lattice Z^d (d is positive integer). The main subject of study is the behavior of particles cloud in space and time. For CBRW on an integer line, Carmona and Hu (2014) examined the asymptotical behavior of the maximal coordinate M_n of the particles at time n. They proved that M_n/n converges to μalmost surely (on a set of local non-degeneracy of CBRW), as n tends to infinity, where μ>0 is a certain constant. Under additional assumption of a single catalyst in CBRW they also investigated the fluctuations o…
We consider a $d$-dimensional branching particle system in a random environment. Suppose that the initial measures converge weakly to a measure with bounded density. Under the Mytnik-Sturm branching mechanism, we prove that the corresponding empirical measure $X_t^n$ converges weakly in the Skorohod space $D([0,T];M_F(\mathbb{R}^d))$ and the limit has a density $u_t(x)$, where $M_F(\mathbb{R}^d)$ is the space of finite measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We also derive a stochastic partial differential equation $u_t(x)$ satisfies. By using the techniques of Malliavin calculus, we prove that $u_t(x)$ i…
It is well known that the behaviour of a branching process is completely described by the generating function of the offspring law and its fixed points. Branching random walks are a natural generalization of branching processes: a branching process can be seen as a one-dimensional branching random walk. We define a multidimensional generating function associated to a given branching random walk. The present paper investigates the similarities and the differences of the generating functions, their fixed points and the implications on the underlying stochastic process, between the one-dimensiona…
A catalytic branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice, with arbitrary finite number of catalysts, is studied in supercritical regime. The dynamics of spatial spread of the particles population is examined, upon normalization. The components of the vector random walk jump are assumed independent (or close to independent) and have semi-exponential distributions with, possibly, different parameters. A limit theorem on the almost sure normalized positions of the particles at the population ``front'' is established. Contrary to the case of the random walk increments with ``light'' distrib…
We consider a supercritical symmetric continuous-time branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with a finite number of particle generation sources of varying positive intensities without any restrictions on the variance of jumps of the underlying random walk. It is assumed that the spectrum of the evolution operator contains at least one positive eigenvalue. We prove that under these conditions the largest eigenvalue of the evolution operator is simple and determines the rate of exponential growth of particle quantities at every point on the lattice as well as on the lattice as a wh…
Branching processes are widely used to model the viral epidemic evolution. For more adequate investigation of viral epidemic modelling, we suggest to apply branching processes with transport of particles usually called branching random walks (BRWs). This allows to investigate not only the number of particles (infected individuals), but also their spatial spread. We consider two models of continuous-time BRWs on a multidimensional lattice in which the transport of infected individuals is described by a symmetric random walk on a multidimensional lattice whereas the processes of birth and death …
The frog model is an interacting particle system on a graph. Active particles perform independent simple random walks, while sleeping particles remain inert until visited by an active particle. Some number of sleeping particles are placed at each site sampled independently from a certain distribution, and then one particle is activated to begin the process. We show that the recurrence or transience of the model is sensitive not just to the expectation but to the entire distribution. This is in contrast to closely related models like branching random walk and activated random walk.
We consider particle systems in locally compact Abelian groups with particles moving according to a process with symmetric stationary independent increments and undergoing one and two levels of critical branching. We obtain long time fluctuation limits for the occupation time process of the one-and two-level systems. We give complete results for the case of finite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are Gaussian random fields, and partial results for an example of infinite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are stable random fields. The asymptotics of the occupation …
Several phase transitions for excited random walks on the integers are known to be characterized by a certain drift parameter delta. For recurrence/transience the critical threshold is |delta|=1, for ballisticity it is |delta|=2 and for diffusivity |delta|=4. In this paper we establish a phase transition at |delta|=3. We show that the expected return time of the walker to the starting point, conditioned on return, is finite iff |delta|>3. This result follows from an explicit description of the tail behaviour of the return time as a function of delta, which is achieved by diffusion approximatio…
We consider a new model of a branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with continuous time and one source of particle reproduction and death, as well as an infinite number of sources in which, in addition to the walk, only absorption of particles can occur. The asymptotic behavior of the integer moments of both the total number of particles and the number of particles at a lattice point is studied depending on the relationship between the model parameters. In the case of the existence of an isolated positive eigenvalue of the evolution operator of the average number of particles, a …
It is a common practice to describe branching random walks in terms of birth, death and walk of particles, which makes it easier to use them in different applications. The main results obtained for the models of symmetric continuous-time heavy-tailed branching random walks on a multidimensional lattice. We will be mainly interested in studying the problems related to the limiting behavior of branching random walks such as the existence of phase transitions under change of various parameters, the properties of the limiting distribution and the survival probability of a particle population. Emph…
We consider a continuous-time symmetric branching random walk on multidimensional lattices with immigration and infinite number of initial particles. We assume that at every lattice point a process of birth and death of particles is described by a Bienayme-Galton- Watson branching process. The assumption on immigration of particles is that a new particle can appear at every lattice point from the outside. The subject of the study is a limit distribution of the particle field on the lattice. The differential equations for correlation functions for the number of particles at an arbitrary time mo…
Directed covers of finite graphs are also known as periodic trees or trees with finitely many cone types. We expand the existing theory of directed covers of finite graphs to those of infinite graphs. While the lower growth rate still equals the branching number, upper and lower growth rates do not longer coincide in general. Furthermore, the behaviour of random walks on directed covers of infinite graphs is more subtle. We provide a classification in terms of recurrence and transience and point out that the critical random walk may be recurrent or transient. Our proof is based on the observat…
Consideration is given to the continuous-time supercritical branching random walk over a multidimensional lattice with a finite number of particle generation sources of the same intensity both with and without constraint on the variance of jumps of random walk underlying the process. Asymptotic behavior of the Green function and eigenvalue of the evolution operator of the mean number of particles under source intensity close to the critical one was established.
We consider a continuous-time branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice in a random branching medium. It is theoretically known that, in such branching random walks, large rare fluctuations of the medium may lead to anomalous properties of a particle field, e.g., such as intermittency. However, the time intervals on which this intermittency phenomenon can be observed are very difficult to estimate in practice. In this paper, branching media containing only a finite and non-finite number of branching sources are considered. The evolution of the mean number of particles with a random p…
We study a model of multi-excited random walk with non-nearest neighbour steps on $\mathbb Z$, in which the walk can jump from a vertex $x$ to either $x+1$ or $x-i$ with $i\in \{1,2,\dots,L\}$, $L\ge 1$. We first point out the multi-type branching structure of this random walk and then prove a limit theorem for a related multi-type Galton-Watson process with emigration, which is of independent interest. Combining this result and the method introduced by Basdevant and Singh [Probab. Theory Related Fields (2008), 141 (3-4)], we extend their result (w.r.t the case $L=1$) to our model. More specif…
Branching random walks on multidimensional lattice with heavy tails and a constant branching rate are considered. It is shown that under these conditions (heavy tails and constant rate), the front propagates exponentially fast, but the particles inside of the front are distributed very non-uniformly. The particles exhibit intermittent behavior in a large part of the region behind the front (i.e., the particles are concentrated only in very sparse spots there). The zone of non-intermittency (were particles are distributed relatively uniformly) extends with a power rate. This rate is found.
This paper provides full classification of dynamics for continuous time Markov chains (CTMCs) on the non-negative integers with polynomial transition rate functions. Such stochastic processes are abundant in applications, in particular in biology. More precisely, for CTMCs of bounded jumps, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of calculable parameters for explosivity, recurrence vs transience, certain absorption, positive recurrence vs null recurrence, and implosivity. Simple sufficient conditions for exponential ergodicity of stationary distributions and quasi-stationary di…
We consider a continuous-time symmetric supercritical branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with a finite set of the particle generation centres, i.e. branching sources. The main object of study is the evolutionary operator for the mean number of particles both at an arbitrary point and on the entire lattice. The existence of positive eigenvalues in the spectrum of an evolutionary operator results in an exponential growth of the number of particles in branching random walks, called supercritical in the such case. For supercritical branching random walks, it is shown that the amou…
In the setting of multidimensional diffusions in random environment, we carry on the investigation of condition $(T')$, introduced by Sznitman [Ann. Probab. 29 (2001) 723--764] and by Schmitz [Ann. Inst. H. Poincaré Probab. Statist. 42 (2006) 683--714] respectively in the discrete and continuous setting, and which implies a law of large numbers with nonvanishing limiting velocity (ballistic behavior) as well as a central limit theorem. Specifically, we show that when $d\geq2$, $(T')$ is equivalent to an effective condition that can be checked by local inspection of the environment. When $d=1$,…
