When we cut an i.i.d. sequence of letters into words according to an independent renewal process, we obtain an i.i.d. sequence of words. In the \emph{annealed} large deviation principle (LDP) for the empirical process of words, the rate function is the specific relative entropy of the observed law of words w.r.t. the reference law of words. In the present paper we consider the \emph{quenched} LDP, i.e., we condition on a typical letter sequence. We focus on the case where the renewal process has an \emph{algebraic} tail. The rate function turns out to be a sum of two terms, one being the annealed rate function, the other being proportional to the specific relative entropy of the observed law of letters w.r.t. the reference law of letters, with the former being obtained by concatenating the words and randomising the location of the origin. The proportionality constant equals the tail exponent of the renewal process. Earlier work by Birkner considered the case where the renewal process has an exponential tail, in which case the rate function turns out to be the first term on the set where the second term vanishes and to be infinite elsewhere.
The previous version (arXiv:0807.2611v2) appeared in Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 148, no. 3/4 (2010), 403--456. Meanwhile, it has turned out that the original proof of the representation of the rate function is flawed when the mean word length is infinite. We add an erratum in which we fix the flaw in the proof. Along the way we derive new representations of the rate function that are interesting in their own right. A key ingredient in the proof is the observation that if the rate function in the annealed large deviation principle is finite at a stationary word process, then the letters in the tail of the long words in this process are typical.
We prove a full large deviations principle in large time, for a diffusion process with random drift V, which is a centered Gaussian shear flow random field. The large deviations principle is established in a ``quenched'' setting, i.e. is valid almost surely in the randomness of V.
We consider the small deviation probability for random walk with time-inhomogeneous random environment. Compared with the result in Mogul'ski\uı (1974) for the i.i.d. random walk, the rate is smaller (due to the random environment), which is specified in terms of the quenched and annealed variance.
We introduce a perceptron version of the Generalized Random Energy Model, and prove a quenched Sanov type large deviation principle for the empirical distribution of the random energies. The dual of the rate function has a representation through a variational formula which is closely related to the Parisi variational formula for the SK-model.
In this paper, we are interested in some questions of Greven and den Hollander about the rate function $I\_η^q$ of quenched large deviations for random walk in random environment. By studying the hitting times of RWRE, we prove that in the recurrent case, $\lim\_{θ\to 0^+}(I\_η^q)''(θ)=+\infty$, which gives an affirmative answer to a conjecture of Greven and den Hollander. We also establish a comparison result between the rate function of quenched large deviations for a diffusion in a drifted Brownian potential, and the rate function for a drifted Brownian motion with the same speed.
We consider a bounded step size random walk in an ergodic random environment with some ellipticity, on an integer lattice of arbitrary dimension. We prove a level 3 large deviation principle, under almost every environment, with rate function related to a relative entropy.
We consider multiple time scales systems of stochastic differential equations with small noise in random environments. We prove a quenched large deviations principle with explicit characterization of the action functional. The random medium is assumed to be stationary and ergodic. In the course of the proof we also prove related quenched ergodic theorems for controlled diffusion processes in random environments that are of independent interest. The proof relies entirely on probabilistic arguments, allowing to obtain detailed information on how the rare event occurs. We derive a control, equiva…
A quenched large deviation principle for Brownian motion in a non-negative, stationary potential is proved. A sufficient moment condition on the potential is given but unlike the results of Armstrong and Tran (2014) no regularity is assumed. The proof is based on a method developed by Sznitman (1994) for Brownian motion among Poissonian potential. In particular, the LDP holds for potentials with polynomially decaying correlations such as the classical potentials studied by L. Pastur (1977) and R. Fukushima (2008) and the potentials recently introduced by H. Lacoin (2012).
We study quenched distributions on random walks in a random potential on integer lattices of arbitrary dimension and with an arbitrary finite set of admissible steps. The potential can be unbounded and can depend on a few steps of the walk. Directed, undirected and stretched polymers, as well as random walk in random environment, are covered. The restriction needed is on the moment of the potential, in relation to the degree of mixing of the ergodic environment. We derive two variational formulas for the limiting quenched free energy and prove a process-level quenched large deviation principle…
We take the point of view of the particle in a multidimensional nearest neighbor random walk in random environment (RWRE). We prove a quenched large deviation principle and derive a variational formula for the quenched rate function. Most of the previous results in this area rely on the subadditive ergodic theorem. We employ a different technique which is based on a minimax theorem. Large deviation principles for RWRE have been proven for i.i.d. nestling environments subject to a moment condition and for ergodic uniformly elliptic environments. We assume only that the environment is ergodic an…
We consider random walk with bounded jumps on a hypercubic lattice of arbitrary dimension in a dynamic random environment. The environment is temporally independent and spatially translation invariant. We study the rate functions of the level-3 averaged and quenched large deviation principles from the point of view of the particle. In the averaged case the rate function is a specific relative entropy, while in the quenched case it is a Donsker-Varadhan type relative entropy for Markov processes. We relate these entropies to each other and seek to identify the minimizers of the level-3 to level…
We consider large deviations for nearest-neighbor random walk in a uniformly elliptic i.i.d. environment. It is easy to see that the quenched and the averaged rate functions are not identically equal. When the dimension is at least four and Sznitman's transience condition (T) is satisfied, we prove that these rate functions are finite and equal on a closed set whose interior contains every nonzero velocity at which the rate functions vanish.
We study a spin-flip model with Kac type interaction, in the presence of a random field given by i.i.d. bounded random variables. The system, spatially inhomogeneous, evolves according to a non conservative (Glauber) dynamics. We show an almost sure (with respect to the random field) large deviations principle for the empirical magnetizations of this process. The rate functional depends on the statistical properties of the external random field, it is lower semicontinuous with compact level sets.
We consider a random walk in random environment with random holding times, that is, the random walk jumping to one of its nearest neighbors with some transition probability after a random holding time. Both the transition probabilities and the laws of the holding times are randomly distributed over the integer lattice. Our main result is a quenched large deviation principle for the position of the random walk. The rate function is given by the Legendre transform of the so-called Lyapunov exponents for the Laplace transform of the first passage time. By using this representation, we derive some…
We study an inhomogeneous generalization of the classical corner growth in which the weights are exponentially distributed with random parameters. Our main interest is in the quenched and annealed large deviation properties of the last passage times. We derive variational representations of the rate functions for right tail large deviations. The quenched rate function can be computed explicitly for certain choices of the parameter distributions. We present a mechanism for rate n left tail annealed large deviations. In the quenched model these deviations have rate strictly greater than n. The a…
We take the point of view of a particle performing random walk with bounded jumps on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ in a stationary and ergodic random environment. We prove the quenched large deviation principle (LDP) for the pair empirical measure of the environment Markov chain. By an appropriate contraction, we deduce the quenched LDP for the mean velocity of the particle and obtain a variational formula for the corresponding rate function. We propose an Ansatz for the minimizer of this formula. When $d=1$, we verify this Ansatz and generalize the nearest-neighbor result of Comets, Gantert and Zeitouni to …
Consider a random walk in a time-dependent random environment on the lattice Zd. Recently, Rassoul-Agha, Seppalainen and Yilmaz [RSY11] proved a general large deviation principle under mild ergodicity assumptions on the random environment for such a random walk, establishing first level 2 and 3 large deviation principles. Here we present two alternative short proofs of the level 1 large deviations under mild ergodicity assumptions on the environment: one for the continuous time case and another one for the discrete time case. Both proofs provide the existence, continuity and convexity of the…
This thesis concerns the study of random walks in random environments (RWRE). Since there are two levels of randomness for random walks in random environments, there are two different distributions for the random walk that can be studied. The quenched distribution is the law of the random walk conditioned on a given environment. The annealed distribution is the quenched law averaged over all environments. The main results of the thesis fall into two categories: quenched limiting distributions for one-dimensional, transient RWRE and annealed large deviations for multidimensional RWRE. The analy…
We prove a {\it{quenched}} large deviation principle (LDP) for a simple random walk on a supercritical percolation cluster (SRWPC) on $\mathbb Z^d$ ($d\geq 2$). The models under interest include classical Bernoulli bond and site percolation as well as models that exhibit long range correlations, like the random cluster model, the random interlacement and {the vacant set of random interlacements} (for $d\geq 3$) and the level sets of the Gaussian free field ($d\geq 3$). Inspired by the methods developed by Kosygina, Rezakhanlou and Varadhan ([KRV06]) for proving quenched LDP for elliptic diffus…
Consider the standard, one dimensional, nonlinear filtering problem for a diffusion processe $Ξ_t$ observed in small additive white noise. Denote by $q^ε_1(\cdot)$ the density of the law of $Ξ_1$ conditioned on $σ(Y_t^ε: 0\leq t\leq 1)$. We provide "quenched" large deviation estimates for the random family of measures $q^ε_1(x)dx$: there exists a continuous, explicit mapping $\bar J : R^2\to R$ such that for almost all $B_\cdot,V_\cdot$, $\bar J(\cdot,X_1)$ is a good rate function and for any measurable $G\subset R$, $$-\inf_{x\in G^o} \bar J(x,X_1) \leq \liminf ε\log \int_G q_1^ε(x) dx \leq \…
We prove the analogue for continuous space-time of the quenched LDP derived in Birkner, Greven and den Hollander (2010) for discrete space-time. In particular, we consider a random environment given by Brownian increments, cut into pieces according to an independent continuous-time renewal process. We look at the empirical process obtained by recording both the length of and the increments in the successive pieces. For the case where the renewal time distribution has a Lebesgue density with a polynomial tail, we derive the quenched LDP for the empirical process, i.e., the LDP conditional on a …
We establish large deviation principles and phase transition results for both quenched and annealed settings of nearest-neighbor random walks with constant drift in random nonnegative potentials on $\mathbb Z^d$. We complement the analysis of \cite{Zer}, where a shape theorem on the Lyapunov functions and a large deviation principle in absence of the drift are achieved for the quenched setting.
We consider a random walk in a random environment (RWRE) on the strip of finite width $\mathbb{Z} \times \{1,2,\ldots,d\}$. We prove both quenched and averaged large deviation principles for the position and the hitting times of the RWRE. Moreover, we prove a variational formula that relates the quenched and averaged rate functions, thus extending a result of Comets, Gantert, and Zeitouni for nearest-neighbor RWRE on $\mathbb{Z}$
This is a continuation of our earlier work [Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 129(1), pp.102--128, 2019] on the random walk in random scenery and in random layered conductance. We complete the picture of upper deviation of the random walk in random scenery, and also prove a bound on lower deviation probability. Based on these results, we determine asymptotics of the return probability, a certain moderate deviation probability, and the Green function of the random walk in random layered conductance.
We consider the simple random walk on Z^d evolving in a potential of independent and identically distributed random variables taking values in [0, + \infty]. We give optimal conditions for the existence of the quenched point-to-point Lyapunov exponent, and for different versions of a shape theorem. The method of proof applies as well to first-passage percolation, and builds up on an approach of Cox and Durrett (1981). The weakest form of shape theorem holds whenever the set of sites with finite potential percolates. Under this condition, we then show the existence of the quenched point-to-hype…
In 2003, Varadhan [V03] developed a robust method for proving quenched and averaged large deviations for random walks in a uniformly elliptic and i.i.d. environment (RWRE) on $\mathbb Z^d$. One fundamental question which remained open was to determine when the quenched and averaged large deviation rate functions agree, and when they do not. In this article we show that for RWRE in uniformly elliptic and i.i.d. environment in $d\geq 4$, the two rate functions agree on any compact set contained in the interior of their domain which does not contain the origin, provided that the disorder of the e…
We discuss the quenched tail estimates for the random walk in random scenery. The random walk is the symmetric nearest neighbor walk and the random scenery is assumed to be independent and identically distributed, non-negative, and has a power law tail. We identify the long time aymptotics of the upper deviation probability of the random walk in quenched random scenery, depending on the tail of scenery distribution and the amount of the deviation. The result is in turn applied to the tail estimates for a random walk in random conductance which has a layered structure.
When an i.i.d.\ sequence of letters is cut into words according to i.i.d.\ renewal times, an i.i.d.\ sequence of words is obtained. In the \emph{annealed} LDP (large deviation principle) for the empirical process of words, the rate function is the specific relative entropy of the observed law of words w.r.t.\ the reference law of words. In Birkner, Greven and den Hollander \cite{BGdH10} the \emph{quenched} LDP (= conditional on a typical letter sequence) was derived for the case where the renewal times have an \emph{algebraic} tail. The rate function turned out to be a sum of two terms, one be…
We consider the quenched and the averaged (or annealed) large deviation rate functions $I_q$ and $I_a$ for space-time and (the usual) space-only RWRE on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. By Jensen's inequality, $I_a\leq I_q$. In the space-time case, when $d\geq3+1$, $I_q$ and $I_a$ are known to be equal on an open set containing the typical velocity $ξ_o$. When $d=1+1$, we prove that $I_q$ and $I_a$ are equal only at $ξ_o$. Similarly, when d=2+1, we show that $I_a<I_q$ on a punctured neighborhood of $ξ_o$. In the space-only case, we provide a class of non-nestling walks on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with d=2 or 3, and prov…
The aim of the paper is to establish a large deviation principle (LDP) for the empirical measure of mean-field interacting diffusions in a random environment. The point is to derive such a result once the environment has been frozen (quenched model). The main theorem states that a LDP holds for every realization of the environment, with a rate function that does not depend on the disorder and is different from the rate function in the averaged model. Similar results concerning the empirical flow and local empirical measures are provided.
We consider a random walk in a random potential on a square lattice of arbitrary dimension. The potential is a function of an ergodic environment and some steps of the walk. The potential can be unbounded, but it is subject to a moment assumption whose strictness is tied to the mixing of the environment, the best case being the i.i.d. environment. We prove that the infinite volume quenched point-to-point free energy exists and has a variational formula in terms of an entropy. We establish regularity properties of the point-to-point free energy, as a function of the potential and as a function …
We present precise moderate deviation probabilities, in both quenched and annealed settings, for a recurrent diffusion process with a Brownian potential. Our method relies on fine tools in stochastic calculus, including Kotani's lemma and Lamperti's representation for exponential functionals. In particular, our result for quenched moderate deviations is in agreement with a recent theorem of Comets and Popov [Probab. Theory Related Fields 126 (2003) 571-609] who studied the corresponding problem for Sinai's random walk in random environment.
We find a sufficient condition under which a central limit theorem for a stationary linear process is quenched. We find a stationary linear process szatisfying the Maxwell-Woodroofe condition for which the variances of partial sums are o(n), there is a CLT with a convergence towards N(0,1) when dividing by standard deviation of the partial sums, and the CLT is not quenched. The weak invariance principle does not hold.
We prove a {\it{quenched}} large deviation principle (LDP) for a simple random walk on a supercritical percolation cluster on $\Z^d$, $d\geq 2$.. We take the point of view of the moving particle and first prove a quenched LDP for the distribution of the {\it{pair empirical measures}} of the environment Markov chain. Via a contraction principle, this reduces easily to a quenched LDP for the distribution of the mean velocity of the random walk and both rate functions admit explicit (variational) formulas. Our results are based on invoking ergodicity arguments in this non-elliptic set up to contr…
For a random walk in a uniformly elliptic and i.i.d. environment on $\mathbb Z^d$ with $d \geq 4$, we show that the quenched and annealed large deviations rate functions agree on any compact set contained in the boundary $\partial \mathbb{D}:=\{ x \in \mathbb R^d : |x|_1 =1\}$ of their domain which does not intersect any of the $(d-2)$-dimensional facets of $\partial \mathbb{D}$, provided that the disorder of the environment is~low~enough. As a consequence, we obtain a simple explicit formula for both rate functions on $\partial \mathbb{D}$ at low disorder. In contrast to previous works, our r…
We apply the techniques developed in Comets and Popov (2003) to present a new proof to Sinai's theorem (Sinai, 1982) on one-dimensional random walk in random environment (RWRE), working in a scale-free way to avoid rescaling arguments and splitting the proof in two independent parts: a quenched one, related to the measure $P_ω$ conditioned on a fixed, typical realization $ω$ of the environment, and an annealed one, related to the product measure $\mathbb{P}$ of the environment $ω$. The quenched part still holds even if we use another measure (possibly dependent) for the environment.
Let $p\in[1,\infty]$. Consider the projection of a uniform random vector from a suitably normalized $\ell^p$ ball in $\mathbb{R}^n$ onto an independent random vector from the unit sphere. We show that sequences of such random projections, when suitably normalized, satisfy a large deviation principle (LDP) as the dimension $n$ goes to $\infty$, which can be viewed as an annealed LDP. We also establish a quenched LDP (conditioned on a fixed sequence of projection directions) and show that for $p\in(1,\infty]$ (but not for $p=1$), the corresponding rate function is "universal", in the sense that …
We prove large deviations principles in large time, for the Brownian occupation time in random scenery. The random scenery is constant on unit cubes, and consist of i.i.d. bounded variables, independent of the Brownian motion. This model is a time-continuous version of Kesten and Spitzer's random walk in random scenery. We prove large deviations principles in ``quenched'' and ``annealed'' settings.
We investigate the asymptotic standard deviation of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of two independent i.i.d. sequences of length n. The first sequence is drawn from a three letter alphabet {0,1,a}, whilst the second sequence is binary. The main result of this article is that in this asymmetric case, the standard deviation of the length of the LCS is of order square root of n. This confirms Waterman's conjecture for this special case. Our result seems to indicate that in many other situations the order of the standard deviation is also square root of n.
We show quenched large deviations for the simple random walk on a certain class of percolations with long-range correlations. This class contains the supercritical Bernoulli percolations, the model considered by Drewitz, R'ath and Sapozhnikov and the random-cluster model up to the slab critical point. Our result is an extension of Kubota's result for the supercritical Bernoulli percolations. We also state a shape theorem for the chemical distance, which is an extension of Garet and Marchand's result for the supercritical Bernoulli percolations.
We consider random walk $(X_n)_{n\geq0}$ on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ in a space--time product environment $ω\inΩ$. We take the point of view of the particle and focus on the environment Markov chain $(T_{n,X_n}ω)_{n\geq0}$ where $T$ denotes the shift on $Ω$. Conditioned on the particle having asymptotic mean velocity equal to any given $ξ$, we show that the empirical process of the environment Markov chain converges to a stationary process $μ_ξ^{\infty}$ under the averaged measure. When $d\geq3$ and $ξ$ is sufficiently close to the typical velocity, we prove that averaged and quenched large deviations a…
We prove quenched versions of a central limit theorem, a large deviations principle as well as a local central limit theorem for expanding on average cocycles. This is achieved by building an appropriate modification of the spectral method for non-autonomous dynamics developed by Dragičević et al., to deal with the case of random dynamics that exhibits nonuniform decay of correlations, which are ubiquitous in the context of the multiplicative ergodic theory. Our results provide an affirmative answer to a question posed by Buzzi.
Random walk in a dynamic i.i.d. beta random environment, conditioned to escape at an atypical velocity, converges to a Doob transform of the original walk. The Doob-transformed environment is correlated in time, i.i.d. in space, and its marginal density function is a product of a beta density and a hypergeometric function. Under its averaged distribution the transformed walk obeys the wandering exponent 2/3 that agrees with Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality. The harmonic function in the Doob transform comes from a Busemann-type limit and appears as an extremal in a variational problem for the q…
In this paper, we obtain sufficient conditions in terms of projective criteria under which the partial sums of a stationary process with values in ${\mathcal{H}}$ (a real and separable Hilbert space) admits an approximation, in ${\mathbb{L}}^p({\mathcal{H}})$, $p>1$, by a martingale with stationary differences, and we then estimate the error of approximation in ${\mathbb{L}}^p({\mathcal{H}})$. The results are exploited to further investigate the behavior of the partial sums. In particular we obtain new projective conditions concerning the Marcinkiewicz-Zygmund theorem, the moderate deviations …
We derive an annealed large deviation principle (LDP) for the normalised and rescaled local times of a continuous-time random walk among random conductances (RWRC) in a time-dependent, growing box in $\Z^d$. We work in the interesting case that the conductances are positive, but may assume arbitrarily small values. Thus, the underlying picture of the principle is a joint strategy of small conductance values and large holding times of the walk. The speed and the rate function of our principle are explicit in terms of the lower tails of the conductance distribution as well as the time-dependent …
We consider the probability that a weighted sum of $n$ i.i.d. random variables $X_j$, $j = 1, . . ., n$, with stretched exponential tails is larger than its expectation and determine the rate of its decay, under suitable conditions on the weights. We show that the decay is subexponential, and identify the rate function in terms of the tails of $X_j$ and the weights. Our result generalizes the large deviation principle given by Kiesel and Stadtmüller [8] as well as the tail asymptotics for sums of i.i.d. random variables provided by Nagaev [10, 11]. As an application of our result, motivated by…
Given an $n$-dimensional random vector $X^{(n)}$ , for $k < n$, consider its $k$-dimensional projection $\mathbf{a}_{n,k}X^{(n)}$, where $\mathbf{a}_{n,k}$ is an $n \times k$-dimensional matrix belonging to the Stiefel manifold $\mathbb{V}_{n,k}$ of orthonormal $k$-frames in $\mathbb{R}^n$. For a class of sequences $\{X^{(n)}\}$ that includes the uniform distributions on scaled $\ell_p^n$ balls, $p \in (1,\infty]$, and product measures with sufficiently light tails, it is shown that the sequence of projected vectors $\{\mathbf{a}_{n,k}^\intercal X^{(n)}\}$ satisfies a large deviation principle…
Considering two optimally aligned random sequences, we investigate the effect on the alignment score caused by changing a random letter in one of the two sequences. Using this idea in conjunction with large deviations theory, we show that in alignments with a low proportion of gaps the optimal alignment is locally unique in most places with high probability. This has implications in the design of recently pioneered alignment methods that use the local uniqueness as a homology indicator.
We investigate the large deviations of the shape of the random RSK Young diagrams associated with a random word of size $n$ whose letters are independently drawn from an alphabet of size $m=m(n)$. When the letters are drawn uniformly and when both $n$ and $m$ converge together to infinity, $m$ not growing too fast with respect to $n$, the large deviations of the shape of the Young diagrams are shown to be the same as that of the spectrum of the traceless GUE. In the non-uniform case, a control of both highest probabilities will ensure that the length of the top row of the diagram satisfies a l…
We give the random environment version of Mogul'ski\vı estimation in quenched sense.Assume that $\{μ\}_{n\in\bfN}$ (called environment) is a sequence of i.i.d. random probability measures on $\bfR.$~ Let $\{X_n\}_{n\in\bfN}$ be a sequence of independent random variables, where $X_n$ has law $μ_n.$ We set $S_n=\sum_{i=1}^{n}X_i.$ Under some integrability conditions, we show that on the log scale, for any power function $f$. the decay rate of $$\bfP_μ(\forall_{0\leq i\leq n} S_{f(n)+i}\in[g(i/n)n^α,h(i/n)n^α]|S_{f(n)}=x)$$ is $e^{-cn^{1-2α}}$ almost surely as $n\rightarrow+\infty$, where $c>0,α\…
We consider large deviations for nearest-neighbor random walk in a uniformly elliptic i.i.d. environment on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. There exist variational formulae for the quenched and averaged rate functions $I_q$ and $I_a$, obtained by Rosenbluth and Varadhan, respectively. $I_q$ and $I_a$ are not identically equal. However, when $d\geq4$ and the walk satisfies the so-called (T) condition of Sznitman, they have been previously shown to be equal on an open set $\mathcal{A}_{\mathit {eq}}$. For every $ξ\in\mathcal{A}_{\mathit {eq}}$, we prove the existence of a positive solution to a Laplace-like equ…
We prove a quenched weak large deviations principle for the Gibbs measures of a Random Field Kac Model (RFKM) in one dimension. The external random magnetic field is given by symmetrically distributed Bernoulli random variables. The results are valid for values of the temperature, $β^{-1}$, and magnitude, $θ$, of the field in the region where the free energy of the corresponding random Curie Weiss model has only two absolute minima $m_β$ and $Tm_β$. We give an explicit representation of the rate functional which is a positive random functional determined by two distinct contributions. One is r…
