This article provides an overview of recent work on descriptions and properties of the convex minorant of random walks and Lévy processes which summarize and extend the literature on these subjects.
The results surveyed include point process descriptions of the convex minorant of random walks and Lévy processes on a fixed finite interval, up to an independent exponential time, and in the infinite horizon case. These descriptions follow from the invariance of these processes under an adequate path transformation. In the case of Brownian motion, we note how further special properties of this process, including time-inversion, imply a sequential description for the convex minorant of the Brownian meander.
We prove distributional limit theorems for the length of the largest convex minorant of a one-dimensional random walk with independent identically distributed increments. Depending on the increment law, there are several regimes with different limit distributions for this length. Among other tools, a representation of the convex minorant of a random walk in terms of uniform random permutations is utilized.
This article contains both a point process and a sequential description of the greatest convex minorant of Brownian motion on a finite interval. We use these descriptions to provide new analysis of various features of the convex minorant such as the set of times where the Brownian motion meets its minorant. The equivalence of the these descriptions is non-trivial, which leads to many interesting identities between quantities derived from our analysis. The sequential description can be viewed as a Markov chain for which we derive some fundamental properties.
We offer a unified approach to the theory of convex minorants of Lévy processes with continuous distributions. New results include simple explicit constructions of the convex minorant of a Lévy process on both finite and infinite time intervals, and of a Poisson point process of excursions above the convex minorant up to an independent exponential time. The Poisson-Dirichlet distribution of parameter 1 is shown to be the universal law of ranked lengths of excursions of a Lévy process with continuous distributions above its convex minorant on the interval $[0,1]$.
This paper calculates several useful statistical properties of the convex minorant process generated by random walk processes. In particular, we calculate the statistics of the longest segment in the convex minorant of a random walk of a given length. In addition, we calculate the probability that the convex minorant of a random walk of length N is composed of exactly m segments; we give an exact formula for the expected number of segments in the convex minorant. We obsevere that some of this analysis can be meaningful for the case of Brownian motion on finite intervals; we can calculate exact…
We establish a novel characterisation of the law of the convex minorant of any Lévy process. Our self-contained elementary proof is based on the analysis of piecewise linear convex functions and requires only very basic properties of Lévy processes. Our main result provides a new simple and self-contained approach to the fluctuation theory of Lévy processes, circumventing local time and excursion theory. Easy corollaries include classical theorems, such as Rogozin's regularity criterion, Spitzer's identities and the Wiener-Hopf factorisation, as well as a novel factorisation identity.
Using marked Dirichlet processes we characterise the law of the convex minorant of the meander for a certain class of Lévy processes, which includes subordinated stable and symmetric Lévy processes. We apply this characterisaiton to construct $\varepsilon$-strong simulation ($\varepsilon$SS) algorithms for the convex minorant of stable meanders, the finite dimensional distributions of stable meanders and the convex minorants of weakly stable processes. We prove that the running times of our $\varepsilon$SS algorithms have finite exponential moments. We implement the algorithms in Julia 1.0 (av…
The sequence of the simple random walks on Hamming schemes $\{H(n, q)\}_{n=1}^{\infty}$ has a cutoff phenomenon for each integer $q$ greater than or equal to $3$. In this paper, for the sequence of simple random walks on Hamming schemes $\{H(n, q)\}_{n=1}^{\infty}$ with $q\geq 3$, we give a simple majorant and a sharp minorant function for total variance distances between transition distributions and stationary distributions.
We describe the rate of growth of the derivative $C'$ of the convex minorant of a Lévy path at times where $C'$ increases continuously. Since the convex minorant is piecewise linear, $C'$ may exhibit such behaviour either at the vertex time $τ_s$ of finite slope $s=C'_{τ_s}$ or at time $0$ where the slope is $-\infty$. While the convex hull depends on the entire path, we show that the local fluctuations of the derivative $C'$ depend only on the fine structure of the small jumps of the Lévy process and are the same for all time horizons. In the domain of attraction of a stable process, we estab…
It is well known that the isotonic least squares estimator is characterized as the derivative of the greatest convex minorant of a random walk. Provided the walk has exchangeable increments, we prove that the slopes of the greatest convex minorant are distributed as order statistics of the running averages. This result implies an exact non-asymptotic formula for the squared error risk of least squares in isotonic regression when the true sequence is constant that holds for every exchangeable error distribution.
We consider convex hulls of random walks whose steps belong to the domain of attraction of a stable law in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We prove convergence of the convex hull in the space of all convex and compact subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$, equipped with the Hausdorff distance, towards the convex hull spanned by a path of the limit stable Lévy process. As an application, we establish convergence of (expected) intrinsic volumes under some mild moment/structure assumptions posed on the random walk.
We consider a random walk in the plane which takes steps uniformly distributed on the unit circle centered around the walker's current position but avoids the convex hull of its past positions. This model has been introduced by Angel, Benjamini and Virag. We show a large deviation estimate for the distance of the walker from the origin, which implies that the walker has positive lim inf speed.
We introduce planar random walk conditioned to avoid its past convex hull, and we show that it escapes at a positive limsup speed. Experimental results show that fluctuations from a limiting direction are on the order of n^(3/4). This behavior is also observed for the extremal investor, a natural financial model related to the planar walk.
For the perimeter length and the area of the convex hull of the first $n$ steps of a planar random walk, we study $n \to \infty$ mean and variance asymptotics and establish non-Gaussian distributional limits. Our results apply to random walks with drift (for the area) and walks with no drift (for both area and perimeter length) under mild moments assumptions on the increments. These results complement and contrast with previous work which showed that the perimeter length in the case with drift satisfies a central limit theorem. We deduce these results from weak convergence statements for the c…
We study the convex hull of the first $n$ steps of a planar random walk, and present large-$n$ asymptotic results on its perimeter length $L_n$, diameter $D_n$, and shape. In the case where the walk has a non-zero mean drift, we show that $L_n / D_n \to 2$ a.s., and give distributional limit theorems and variance asymptotics for $D_n$, and in the zero-drift case we show that the convex hull is infinitely often arbitrarily well-approximated in shape by any unit-diameter compact convex set containing the origin, and then $\liminf_{n \to \infty} L_n/D_n =2$ and $\limsup_{n \to \infty} L_n /D_n = …
We prove the existence of uncountably many positive harmonic functions for random walks on the euclidean lattice with non-zero drift, killed when leaving two dimensional convex cones with vertex in 0. Our proof is an adaption of the proof for the positive quadrant from [Ignatiouk-Robert, Loree]. We also make the natural conjecture about the Martin boundary for general convex cones in two dimensions. This is still an open problem and here we only indicate where the proof technique for the positive quadrant breaks down.
We prove large deviations principles (LDPs) for the perimeter and the area of the convex hull of a planar random walk with finite Laplace transform of its increments. We give explicit upper and lower bounds for the rate function of the perimeter in terms of the rate function of the increments. These bounds coincide and thus give the rate function for a wide class of distributions which includes the Gaussians and the rotationally invariant ones. For random walks with such increments, large deviations of the perimeter are attained by the trajectories that asymptotically align into line segments.…
For the perimeter length $L_n$ and the area $A_n$ of the convex hull of the first $n$ steps of a planar random walk, this thesis study $n \to \infty$ mean and variance asymptotics and establish distributional limits. The results apply to random walks both with drift (the mean of random walk increments) and with no drift under mild moments assumptions on the increments. Assuming increments of the random walk have finite second moment and non-zero mean, Snyder and Steele showed that $n^{-1} L_n$ converges almost surely to a deterministic limit, and proved an upper bound on the variance Var$[ L_n…
Denote by $L_n$ the length of the perimeter of the convex hull of $n$ steps of a planar random walk whose increments have finite second moment and non-zero mean. Snyder and Steele showed that $n^{-1} L_n$ converges almost surely to a deterministic limit, and proved an upper bound on the variance $Var [ L_n] = O(n)$. We show that $n^{-1} Var [L_n]$ converges and give a simple expression for the limit, which is non-zero for walks outside a certain degenerate class. This answers a question of Snyder and Steele. Furthermore, we prove a central limit theorem for $L_n$ in the non-degenerate case.
Let $S_k$ be a random walk in $R^d$ such that its distribution of increments does not assign mass to hyperplanes. We study the probability $p_n$ that the convex hull $conv (S_1, \ldots , S_n)$ of the first $n$ steps of the walk does not include the origin. By providing an explicit formula, we show that for planar symmetrically distributed random walks, $p_n$ does not depend on the distribution of increments. This extends the well known result by Sparre Andersen (1949) that a one-dimensional random walk satisfying the above continuity and symmetry assumptions stays positive with a distribution-…
We connect this question to a problem of estimating the probability that the image of certain random matrices does not intersect with a subset of the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{n-1}$. In this way, the case of a discretized Brownian motion is related to Gordon's escape theorem dealing with standard Gaussian matrices. The approach allows us to prove that with high probability, the $π/2$-covering time of certain random walks on $\mathbb{S}^{n-1}$ is of order $n$. For certain spherical simplices on $\mathbb{S}^{n-1}$, we extend the "escape" phenomenon to a broad class of random matrices; as an appli…
We investigate Martin boundary for a non-centered random walk on ${\mathbb Z}^d$ killed up on the time $τ_\vartheta$ of the first exit from a convex cone with a vertex at $0$. The approach combines large deviation estimates, the ratio limite theorem and the ladder height process. The results are applied to identify the Martin boundary for a random walk killed upon the first exit from a convex cone having $C^1$ boundary.
Fix integers $d \geq 2$ and $k\geq d-1$. Consider a random walk $X_0, X_1, \ldots$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ in which, given $X_0, X_1, \ldots, X_n$ ($n \geq k$), the next step $X_{n+1}$ is uniformly distributed on the unit ball centred at $X_n$, but conditioned that the line segment from $X_n$ to $X_{n+1}$ intersects the convex hull of $\{0, X_{n-k}, \ldots, X_n\}$ only at $X_n$. For $k = \infty$ this is a version of the model introduced by Angel et al., which is conjectured to be ballistic, i.e., to have a limiting speed and a limiting direction. We establish ballisticity for the finite-$k$ model, a…
Fluctuations for diameter and perimeter of convex hulls of multiple random walks
Institute of Mathematics, University of Wrocław（弗罗茨瓦夫大学数学研究所）；University of Zagreb Faculty of Science（萨格勒布大学理学院）；University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程和计算学院）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, Durham University（杜伦大学数学科学系）；Department of Mathematics, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学数学系）
We establish the almost sure validity of the multifractal formalism for R^d-valued branching random walks on the whole relative interior of the natural convex domain of study.
This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of the Green function of a multidimensional random walk killed when leaving a convex cone with smooth boundary. Our results imply uniqueness, up to a multiplicative factor, of the positive harmonic function for the killed random walk.
We survey some geometrical properties of trajectories of $d$-dimensional random walks via the application of functional limit theorems. We focus on the functional law of large numbers and functional central limit theorem (Donsker's theorem). For the latter, we survey the underlying weak convergence theory, drawing heavily on the exposition of Billingsley, but explicitly treat the multidimensional case. Our two main applications are to the convex hull of a random walk and the centre of mass process associated to a random walk. In particular, we establish the limit sets of the convex hull in the…
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…
A cyclic random walk is a random walk whose transition probabilities/rates can be written as a superposition of the empirical measures of a family of finite cycles. This identifies a convex set of models. We discuss the problem of characterization of cyclic random walks in some special cases showing that it is related to several remarkable and classical results. In particular we introduce the notion of balanced measure and show that a translation invariant random walk on $\mathbb Z^d$ is cyclic if and only if its transition probability is balanced. The characterization of the extremal elements…
We determine the asymptotic behavior of the Green function for zero-drift random walks confined to multidimensional convex cones. As a consequence, we prove that there is a unique positive discrete harmonic function for these processes (up to a multiplicative constant); in other words, the Martin boundary reduces to a singleton.
We derive explicit formulae for the expected volume and the expected number of facets of the convex hull of several multidimensional Gaussian random walks in terms of the Gaussian persistence probabilities. Special cases include the already known results about the convex hull of a single Gaussian random walk and the $d$-dimensional Gaussian polytope with or without the origin.
For a random walk killed at leaving a cone we suggest two new constructions of a positive harmonic function. These constructions allow one to remove a quite strong extendability assumption, which has been imposed in our previous paper (Denisov and Wachtel, 2015, Random walks in cones). As a consequence, all the limit results from that paper remain true for cones which are either convex or star-like and $C^2$.
In this paper, we study the discrete-time quantum random walks on a line subject to decoherence. The convergence of the rescaled position probability distribution $p(x,t)$ depends mainly on the spectrum of the superoperator $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$. We show that if 1 is an eigenvalue of the superoperator with multiplicity one and there is no other eigenvalue whose modulus equals to 1, then $\hat {P}(\fracν {\sqrt t},t)$ converges to a convex combination of normal distributions. In terms of position space, the rescaled probability mass function $p_t (x, t) \equiv p(\sqrt t x, t)$, $ x \in Z/\sqrt t$,…
In this note - starting from $d$-dimensional (with $d>1$) fuzzy vectors - we prove Donsker's classical invariance principle. We consider a fuzzy random walk ${S^*_n}=X^*_1+\cdots+X^*_n,$ where $\{X^*_i\}_1^{\infty}$ is a sequence of mutually independent and identically distributed $d$-dimensional fuzzy random variables whose $α$-cuts are assumed to be compact and convex. Our reasoning and technique are based on the well known conjugacy correspondence between convex sets and support functions, which allows for the association of an appropriately normalized and interpolated time-continuous fuzzy…
We study the asymptotic behavior of zero-drift random walks confined to multidimensional convex cones, when the endpoint is close to the boundary. We derive a local limit theorem in the fluctuation regime.
We study the set of directions asymptotically explored by a spatially homogeneous random walk in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. We survey some pertinent results of Kesten and Erickson, make some further observations, and present some examples. We also explore links to the asymptotics of one-dimensional projections, and to the growth of the convex hull of the random walk.
Suppose we are given the free product V of a finite family of finite or countable sets. We consider a transient random walk on the free product arising naturally from a convex combination of random walks on the free factors. We prove the existence of the asymptotic entropy and present three different, equivalent formulas, which are derived by three different techniques. In particular, we will show that the entropy is the rate of escape with respect to the Greenian metric. Moreover, we link asymptotic entropy with the rate of escape and volume growth resulting in two inequalities.
We investigate harmonic functions and the convergence of the sequence of ratios $(P_x(τ_\vartheta {>} n)/P_e(τ_\vartheta {>} n))$ for a random walk on a countable group killed up on the time $τ_\vartheta$ of the first exit from some semi-group with an identity element $e$. Several results of classical renewal theory for one dimensional random walk killed at the first exit from the positive half-line are extended to a multi-dimensional setting. For this purpose, an analogue of the ladder height process and the corresponding renewal function $V$ are introduced. The results are applied to multidi…
We revisit the multifractal analysis of $\R^d$-valued branching random walks averages by considering subsets of full Hausdorff dimension of the standard level sets, over each infinite branch of which a quantified version of the Erdös-Rényi law of large numbers holds. Assuming that the exponential moments of the increments of the walks are finite, we can indeed control simultaneously such sets when the levels belong to the interior of the compact convex domain $I$ of possible levels, i.e. when they are associated to so-called Gibbs measures, as well as when they belong to the subset $(\partial{…
We show that almost any one-dimensional projection of a suitably scaled random walk on a hypercube, inscribed in a hypersphere, converges weakly to an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process as the dimension of the sphere tends to infinity. We also observe that the same result holds when the random walk is replaced with spherical Brownian motion. This latter result can be viewed as a "functional" generalisation of Poincaré's observation for projections of uniform measure on high dimensional spheres; the former result is an analogous generalisation of the Bernoulli-Laplace central limit theorem. Given the r…
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…
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 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.
In this paper, we define a new type of decoherent quantum random walks with parameter $0\le p\le 1$, which becomes a unitary quantum random walk (UQRW) when $p=0$ and an open quantum random walk (OPRW) when $p=1$ respectively. We call this process a partially open quantum random walk (POQRW). We study the limiting distribution of a POQRW on $Z^1$ subject to decoherence on coins with $n$ degrees of freedom, which converges to a convex combination of normal distributions if the superoperator $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$ satisfies the eigenvalue condition, that is, 1 is an eigenvalue of $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$ …
In this article we are interested in finding positive discrete harmonic functions with Dirichlet conditions in three quadrants. Whereas planar lattice (random) walks in the quadrant have been well studied, the case of walks avoiding a quadrant has been developed lately. We extend the method in the quarter plane -- resolution of a functional equation via boundary value problem using a conformal mapping -- to the three-quarter plane applying the strategy of splitting the domain into two symmetric convex cones. We obtain a simple explicit expression for the algebraic generating function of harmon…
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…
We give an explicit formula for the probability that the convex hull of an $n$-step random walk in $R^d$ does not contain the origin, under the assumption that the distribution of increments of the walk is centrally symmetric and puts no mass on affine hyperplanes. This extends the formula by Sparre Andersen (1949) for the probability that such random walk in dimension one stays positive. Our result is distribution-free, that is, the probability does not depend on the distribution of increments. This probabilistic problem is shown to be equivalent to either of the two geometric ones: 1) Find t…
