Let $(ξ_1,η_1),(ξ_2,η_2),...$ be a sequence of i.i.d.\ copies of a random vector $(ξ,η)$ taking values in $\R^2$, and let $S_n := ξ_1+...+ξ_n$. The sequence $(S_{n-1} + η_n)_{n \geq 1}$ is then called perturbed random walk.
We study random quantities defined in terms of the perturbed random walk: $τ(x)$, the first time the perturbed random walk exits the interval $(-\infty,x]$, $N(x)$, the number of visits to the interval $(-\infty,x]$, and $ρ(x)$, the last time the perturbed random walk visits the interval $(-\infty,x]$. We provide criteria for the a.s.\ finiteness and for the finiteness of exponential moments of these quantities. Further, we provide criteria for the finiteness of power moments of $N(x)$ and $ρ(x)$.
Vertex-reinforced random walk is defined in Pemantle's (1988) thesis; it is a random walk that is biased to visit sites it has already visited a lot. We show that this reinforcement scheme, in contrast to the scheme of edge-reinforcement, causes random walk on a line to get trapped in a finite set.
We consider the slow movement of randomly biased random walk $(X_n)$ on a supercritical Galton--Watson tree, and are interested in the sites on the tree that are most visited by the biased random walk. Our main result implies tightness of the distributions of the most visited sites under the annealed measure. This is in contrast with the one-dimensional case, and provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first non-trivial example of null recurrent random walk whose most visited sites are not transient, a question originally raised by Erdős and Révész [11] for simple symmetric random walk on …
In this paper, we study the probability of visiting a distant point $a\in \mathbb{Z}^4$ by critical branching random walk starting from the origin. We prove that this probability is bounded by $1/(|a|^2\log |a|)$ up to a constant.
We extend the theory of discrete capacity to critical branching random walk. We introduce branching capacity for any finite subset of $\Z^d, d\geq5$. Analogous to the regular discrete capacity, branching capacity is closely related to the asymptotics of the probability of visiting a fixed finite set by a critical branching random walk starting from a distant point and the conditional distribution of the hitting point.
In this paper we are interested in a random walk in a random environment on a super-critical Galton-Watson tree. We focus on the recurrent cases already studied by Y. Hu and Z. Shi and G. Faraud. We prove that the largest generation entirely visited by these walks behaves like log n and that the constant of normalization which differs from a case to another is function of the inverse of the constant of Biggins' law of large number for branching random walks.
This paper considers the question: how many times does a simple random walk revisit the most frequently visited site among the inner boundary points? It is known that in ${\mathbb{Z}}^2$, the number of visits to the most frequently visited site among all of the points of the random walk range up to time $n$ is asymptotic to $π^{-1}(\log n)^2$, while in ${\mathbb{Z}}^d$ $(d\ge3)$, it is of order $\log n$. We prove that the corresponding number for the inner boundary is asymptotic to $β_d\log n$ for any $d\ge2$, where $β_d$ is a certain constant having a simple probabilistic expression.
In this paper we consider a null recurrent random walk in random environment on a super-critical Galton-Watson tree. We consider the case where the log-Laplace transform $ψ$ of the branching process satisfies $ψ(1)=ψ'(1)=0$ for which G. Faraud, Y. Hu and Z. Shi in \cite{HuShi10b} show that, with probability one, the largest generation visited by the walk, until the instant $n$, is of the order of $(\log n)^3$. In \cite{AndreolettiDebs1} we prove that the largest generation entirely visited behaves almost surely like $\log n$ up to a constant. Here we study how the walk visits the generations $…
In the classical paper of Dvoretzky-Erdős, asymptotics for the expected value and the variance of the number of distinct sites visited by a Simple Symmetric Random Walk were calculated. Here, these results are generalized for Random Walks with Internal States. Moreover, both weak and strong laws of large numbers are proved. As a tool for these results, the error term of the local limit theorem in of Krámli and Szász is also estimated.
We obtain the joint distribution $P_N (X, K|Z)$ of the location $X$ of a one-dimensional symmetric next neighbor random walk on the integer lattice, and the number of times the walk has visited a specified site $Z$. This distribution has a simple form in terms of the one variable distribution $p_{N'}(X')$, where $N'=N-K$ and $X'$ is a function of $X, K$, and $Z$. The marginal distribution of $X$ and $K$ are obtained, as well as their diffusion scaling limits.
For the simple random walk in Z^2 we study those points which are visited an unusually large number of times, and provide a new proof of the Erdos-Taylor conjecture describing the number of visits to the most visited point.
We examine escape and entrance times, Green's functions, local times, and hitting distributions of discs and annuli of a symmetric random walk on $\Z^2$ projected onto the periodic lattice $\Z^2_K$. This extends a framework for the simple planar random walk in Dembo, et al. (2006) to the large class of planar random walks in Bass, Rosen (2007). The approach uses comparisons between $\Z^2$ and $\Z^2_K$ hitting times and distributions on annuli, and uses only random walk methods.
We consider random walks, say $W_n=(M_0, M_1,\dots, M_n)$, of length $n$ starting at 0 and based on the martingale sequence $M_k$ with differences $X_m=M_m-M_{m-1}$. Assuming that the differences are bounded, $|X_m|\leq 1$, we solve the problem \begin{equation} D_n(x)\=\sup P \left\{W_n \ \text{visits an interval}\ [x,\infty)\right\},\qquad x\in R, \label{piirma} \end{equation} where $\sup$ is taken over all possible $W_n$. In particular, we describe random walks which maximize the probability in $\eqref{piirma}$. We also extend the result to super-martingales.
In this paper, we study the critical branching random walk in the critical dimension, $Z^4$. We provide the asymptotics of the probability of visiting a fixed finite subset and the range of the critical branching random walk conditioned on the total number of offsprings. We also prove that conditioned on visiting, the first visiting point converges in distribution.
For a symmetric random walk in $Z^2$ which does not necessarily have bounded jumps we study those points which are visited an unusually large number of times. We prove the analogue of the Erdős-Taylor conjecture and obtain the asymptotics for the number of visits to the most visited site. We also obtain the asymptotics for the number of points which are visited very frequently by time $n$. Among the tools we use are Harnack inequalities and Green's function estimates for random walks with unbounded jumps; some of these are of independent interest.
We consider random walks perturbed at zero which behave like (possibly different) random walks with i.i.d. increments on each half lines and restarts at $0$ whenever they cross that point. We show that the perturbed random walk, after being rescaled in a proper way, converges to a skew Brownian motion whose parameter is defined by renewal functions of the simple random walks and the transition probabilities from $0$.
In this paper we study some properties of random walks perturbed at extrema, which are generalizations of the walks considered e.g., in Davis (1999). This process can also be viewed as a version of {\em excited random walk}, studied recently by many authors. We obtain a few properties related to the range of the process with infinite memory. We also prove the Strong law, Central Limit Theorem, and the criterion for the recurrence of the perturbed walk with finite memory.
Benjamini,Haggstrom, Peres and Steif introduced the model of dynamical random walk on Z^d. This is a continuum of random walks indexed by a parameter t. They proved that for d=3,4 there almost surely exist t such that the random walk at time t visits the origin infinitely often, but for d > 4 there almost surely do not exist such t. Hoffman showed that for d=2 there almost surely exists t such that the random walk at time t visits the origin only finitely many times. We refine the results of Hoffman for dynamical random walk on Z^2, showing that with probability one there are times when the or…
We study the occupation measure of various sets for a symmetric transient random walk in $Z^d$ with finite variances. Let $μ^X_n(A)$ denote the occupation time of the set $A$ up to time $n$. It is shown that $\sup_{x\in Z^d}μ_n^X(x+A)/\log n$ tends to a finite limit as $n\to\infty$. The limit is expressed in terms of the largest eigenvalue of a matrix involving the Green's function of $X$ restricted to the set $A$. Some examples are discussed and the connection to similar results for Brownian motion is given.
The set of visited sites and the number of visited sites are two basic properties of the random walk trajectory. We consider two independent random walks on a hyper-cubic lattice and study ordering probabilities associated with these characteristics. The first is the probability that during the time interval (0,t), the number of sites visited by a walker never exceeds that of another walker. The second is the probability that the sites visited by a walker remain a subset of the sites visited by another walker. Using numerical simulations, we investigate the leading asymptotic behaviors of the …
We consider a random walk in an i.i.d. random environment on Z that is perturbed by cookies of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is assumed to be i.i.d. Results on the speed of the random walk are obtained. Our main tool is the correspondence in certain cases between the random walk and a branching process in a random environment with migration.
Deterministic walk in an excited random environment is a non-Markov integer-valued process $(X_n)_{n=0}^{\infty}$, whose jump at time $n$ depends on the number of visits to the site $X_n$. The environment can be understood as stacks of cookies on each site of $\mathbb Z$. Once all cookies are consumed at a given site, every subsequent visit will result in a walk taking a step according to the direction prescribed by the last consumed cookie. If each site has exactly one cookie, then the walk ends in a loop if it ever visits the same site twice. If the number of cookies per site is increased to…
We study one-dimensional excited random walks with non-nearest neighbor jumps. When the process is at a vertex that has not been visited before, its next transition has a positive drift to the right, possibly with long jumps. Whenever the process visits a vertex that has already been visited in the past, its next transition is the one of a simple symmetric random walk. We give a sufficient condition for the process to have positive speed.
A random walk on Z^d is excited if the first time it visits a vertex there is a bias in one direction, but on subsequent visits to that vertex the walker picks a neighbor uniformly at random. We show that excited random walk on Z^d, is transient iff d>1.
We study tails of the supremum of a perturbed random walk under regime which was not yet considered in the literature. Our approach is based on a new renewal theorem, which is of independent interest. We obtain first and second order asymptotics of the solution to renewal equation under weak assumptions and we apply these results to obtain first and second order asymptotics of the tail of the supremum of a perturbed random walk.
We consider a random walk on integers where at the first visits to a site the walker gets a positive drift, but where after a certain number of visits the walker gets a negative drift. We prove that the walker is almost surely transient to the left with positive speed.
The following random process on $\Z^4$ is studied. At first visit to a site, the two first coordinates perform a (2-dimensional) simple random walk step. At further visits, it is the last two coordinates which perform a simple random walk step. We prove that this process is almost surely transient. The lower dimensional versions are discussed and various generalizations and related questions are proposed.
We consider a symmetric random walk on the $ν$-dimensional lattice, whose exit probability from the origin is modified by an antisymmetric perturbation and prove the local central limit theorem for this process. A short-range correction to diffusive behaviour appears in any dimension along with a long-range correction in the one-dimensional case.
The class of random walks in one dimension, returning to the origin, restricted by the requirement that any site visited (different from the origin) is visited an even number of times, is analyzed in the present note. We call this class the even-visiting random walks and provide a closed expression to evaluate them.
We consider a discrete time simple symmetric random walk on Z^d, d>=1, where the path of the walk is perturbed by inserting deterministic jumps. We show that for any time n and any deterministic jumps that we insert, the expected number of sites visited by the perturbed random walk up to time n is always larger than or equal to that for the unperturbed walk. This intriguing problem arises from the study of a particle among a Poisson system of moving traps with sub-diffusive trap motion. In particular, our result implies a variant of the Pascal principle, which asserts that among all determinis…
Suppose that $(X,Y,Z)$ is a random walk in $\mathbb{Z}^3$ that moves in the following way: on the first visit to a vertex only $Z$ changes by $\pm 1$ equally likely, while on later visits to the same vertex $(X,Y)$ performs a two-dimensional random walk step. We show that this walk is transient thus answering a question of Benjamini, Kozma and Schapira. One important ingredient of the proof is a dispersion result for martingales.
We study the random walk in random environment on {0,1,2,...}, where the environment is subject to a vanishing (random) perturbation. The two particular cases we consider are: (i) random walk in random environment perturbed from Sinai's regime; (ii) simple random walk with random perturbation. We give almost sure results on how far the random walker will be from the origin after a long time t, for almost every environment. We give both upper and lower almost sure bounds. These bounds are of order $(\log t)^β$, for $β\in (1,\infty)$, depending on the perturbation. In addition, in the ergodic ca…
We consider a branching random walk on $\Z$, where the particles behave differently in visited and unvisited sites. Informally, each site on the positive half-line contains initially a cookie. On the first visit of a site its cookie is removed and particles at positions with a cookie reproduce and move differently from particles on sites without cookies. Therefore, the movement and the reproduction of the particles depend on the previous behaviour of the population of particles. We study the question if the process is recurrent or transient, i.e., whether infinitely many particles visit the or…
We introduce a new random walk with unbounded memory obtained as a mixture of the Elephant Random Walk and the Dynamic Random Walk which we call the Dynamic Elephant Random Walk (DERW). As a consequence of this mixture the distribution of the increments of the resulting random process is time dependent. We prove a strong law of large numbers for the DERW and, in a particular case, we provide an explicit expression for its speed. Finally, we give sufficient conditions for the central limit theorem and the law of the iterated logarithm to hold.
We study a simple random walk on Z^2 with constraints on the axis. Motivation comes from physics when particles (a gas for example, see [Dal88]) are submitted to a local field. In our case we assume that the particle evolves freely in the cones but when touching the axis a force pushes it back progressively to the origin. The main result proves that this force can be parametrized in such a way that a renewal structure appears in the trajectory of the random walk. This implies the existence of an ergodic result for the parts of the trajectory restricted to the axis.
Consider a random walk $S=(S_n:n\geq 0)$ that is ``perturbed'' by a stationary sequence $(ξ_n:n\geq 0)$ to produce the process $(S_n+ξ_n:n\geq0)$. This paper is concerned with computing the distribution of the all-time maximum $M_{\infty}=\max \{S_k+ξ_k:k\geq0\}$ of perturbed random walk with a negative drift. Such a maximum arises in several different applications settings, including production systems, communications networks and insurance risk. Our main results describe asymptotics for $\mathbb{P}(M_{\infty}>x)$ as $x\to\infty$. The tail asymptotics depend greatly on whether the $ξ_n$'s are…
Vertex-Reinforced Random Walk (VRRW), defined by Pemantle (1988a), is a random process in a continuously changing environment which is more likely to visit states it has visited before. We consider VRRW on arbitrary graphs and show that on almost all of them, VRRW visits only finitely many vertices with a positive probability. We conjecture that on all graphs of bounded degree, this happens a.s., and provide a proof only for trees of this type. We distinguish between several different patterns of localization and explicitly describe the long-run structure of VRRW, which depends on whether a gr…
We consider diffusivity of random walks with transition probabilities depending on the number of consecutive traversals of the last traversed edge, the so called senile reinforced random walk (SeRW). In one dimension, the walk is known to be sub-diffusive with identity reinforcement function. We perturb the model by introducing a small probability $δ$ of escaping the last traversed edge at each step. The perturbed SeRW model is diffusive for any $δ>0 $, with enhanced diffusivity ($\gg O(δ^2)$) in the small $δ$ regime. We further study stochastically perturbed SeRW models by having the last edg…
Let $(ξ_k,η_k)_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ be independent identically distributed random vectors with arbitrarily dependent positive components. We call a (globally) perturbed random walk a random sequence $(T_k)_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ defined by $T_k:=ξ_1+\cdots+ξ_{k-1}+η_k$ for $k\in\mathbb{N}$. Further, by an iterated perturbed random walk is meant the sequence of point processes defining the birth times of individuals in subsequent generations of a general branching process provided that the birth times of the first generation individuals are given by a perturbed random walk. For $j\in\mathbb{N}$ and $t\…
In \cite{SzT}, D. Szász and A. Telcs have shown that for the diffusively scaled, simple symmetric random walk, weak convergence to the Brownian motion holds even in the case of local impurities if $d \ge 2$. The extension of their result to finite range random walks is straightforward. Here, however, we are interested in the situation when the random walk has unbounded range. Concretely we generalize the statement of \cite{SzT} to unbounded random walks whose jump distribution belongs to the domain of attraction of the normal law. We do this first: for diffusively scaled random walks on $\math…
In this paper we consider a random walk in random environment on a tree and focus on the boundary case for the underlying branching potential. We study the range $R\_n$ of this walk up to time $n$ and obtain its correct asymptotic in probability which is of order $n/\log n$. Thisresult is a consequence of the asymptotical behavior of the number of visited sites at generations of order $(\log n)^2$,which turn out to be the most visited generations. Our proof which involves a quenched analysisgives a description of the typical environments responsible for the behavior of $R\_n$.
We use generalized Ray-Knight theorems introduced by Bálint Tóth in 1996 together with techniques developed for excited random walks as main tools for establishing positive and negative results concerning convergence of some classes of diffusively scaled self-interacting random walks (SIRWs) to Brownian motions perturbed at extrema (BMPE). Tóth's work studied two classes of SIRWs: asymptotically free and polynomially self-repelling walks. For both classes Toth has shown, in particular, that the distribution function of a scaled SIRW observed at independent geometric times converges to that of …
We focus on recurrent random walks in random environment (RWRE) on Galton-Watson trees. The range of these walks, that is the number of sites visited at some fixed time, has been studied in three different papers [AC18], [AdR17] and [dR16]. Here we study the heavy range: the number of edges visited at least $α$ times for some integer $α$. The asymptotic behavior of this process when $α$ is a power of the number of steps of the walk is given for all the recurrent cases. It turns out that this heavy range plays a crucial role in the rate of convergence of an estimator of the environment from a s…
The graph obtained from the integer grid Z x Z by the removal of all horizontal edges that do not belong to the x-axis is called a comb. In a random walk on a graph, whenever a walker is at a vertex v, in the next step it will visit one of the neighbors of v, each with probability 1/d(v), where d(v) denotes the degree of v. We answer a question of Csáki, Csörgö, Földes, Révész, and Tusnády by showing that the expected number of vertices visited by a random walk on the comb after n steps is (1/(2\sqrt{2π})+o(1))\sqrt n\log n. This contradicts a claim of Weiss and Havlin.
We analyze the Brownian Motion limit of a prototypical unit step reinforced random-walk on the half line. A reinforced random walk is one which changes the weight of any edge (or vertex) visited to increase the frequency of return visits. The generating function for the discrete case is first derived for the joint probability distribution of $S_N$ (the location of the walker at the $N$^{th}$ step) and $A_N$ the maximum location the walker achieved in $N$ steps. Then the bulk of the analysis concerns the statistics of the limiting Brownian walker, and of its "environment", both parametrized by …
We consider one-dimensional excited random walks (ERWs) with i.i.d. markovian cookie stacks in the non-boundary recurrent regime. We prove that under diffusive scaling such an ERW converges in the standard Skorokhod topology to a multiple of Brownian motion perturbed at its extrema (BMPE). All parameters of the limiting process are given explicitly in terms of those of the cookie markov chain at a single site. While our results extend the results of Dolgopyat and Kosygina (2012, ERWs with boundedly many cookies per site) and Kosygina and Peterson (2016, ERWs with periodic cookie stacks), the a…
Consider a general branching process, a.k.a. Crump-Mode-Jagers process, generated by a perturbed random walk $η_1$, $ξ_1+η_2$, $ξ_1+ξ_2+η_3,\ldots$. Here, $(ξ_1,η_1)$, $(ξ_2, η_2),\ldots$ are independent identically distributed random vectors with arbitrarily dependent positive components. Denote by $N_j(t)$ the number of the $j$th generation individuals with birth times $\leq t$. Assume that $j=j(t)\to\infty$ and $j(t)=o(t^a)$ as $t\to\infty$ for some explicitly given $a>0$ (to be specified in the paper). The corresponding $j$th generation belongs to the set of intermediate generations. We pr…
We survey the current status of the list of questions related to the favourite (or: most visited) sites of simple random walk on Z, raised by Pal Erdos and Pal Revesz in the early eighties.
We prove that the Beta random walk has second order cubic fluctuations from the large deviation principle of the GUE Tracy-Widom type for arbitrary values $\upalpha>0$ and $\upbeta>0$ of the parameters of the Beta distribution, removing previous restrictions on their values. Furthermore, we prove that the GUE Tracy-Widom fluctuations still hold in the intermediate disorder regime. We also show that any random walk in space-time random environment that matches certain moments with the Beta random walk also has GUE Tracy-Widom fluctuations in the intermediate disorder regime. As a corollary we s…
We prove that, with probability one, eventually there are no more than three favourite (i.e. most visited) sites of simple random walk. This partially answers a relatively long standing question of Pal Erdos and Pal Revesz.
In this article, we consider random walk on the infinite cluster of bond percolation on $\Z^d (d \geq 2)$. We show that the Laplace transformation of the number of visited points $N\_n$, has a behaviour as the random walk was on $\Z^d$. More precisely, for all $0<α<1$, we proved that there exist constants $C\_i$ and $C\_s$ such that for all infinite cluster that contains the origin, we have: $$ e^{-C\_i n^{\frac{d}{d+2}}} \leq \E\_0^ω (α^{N\_n}) \leq e^{-C\_sn^{\frac{d}{d+2}}}.$$ Our approach is based on finding an isoperimetric inequalities on the infinite cluster, lifted on a wreath product …
We consider recurrence versus transience for models of random walks on domains of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, in which monotone interaction enforces domain growth as a result of visits by the walk (or probes it sent), to the neighborhood of domain boundary.
For an arbitrary transient random walk $(S_n)_{n\ge 0}$ in $\mathbb Z^d$, $d\ge 1$, we prove a strong law of large numbers for the spatial sum $\sum_{x\in\mathbb Z^d}f(l(n,x))$ of a function $f$ of the local times $l(n,x)=\sum_{i=0}^n\mathbb I\{S_i=x\}$. Particular cases are the number of (a) visited sites (first time considered by Dvoretzky and Erdős), which corresponds to a function $f(i)=\mathbb I\{i\ge 1\}$; (b) $α$-fold self-intersections of the random walk (studied by Becker and König), which corresponds to $f(i)=i^α$; (c) sites visited by the random walk exactly $j$ times (considered by…
