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 approximation of related branching processes by squared Bessel processes.
We study tail behaviour of the distribution of the area under the positive excursion of a random walk which has negative drift and light-tailed increments. We determine the asymptotics for local probabilities for the area and prove a local central limit theorem for the duration of the excursion conditioned on the large values of its area.
We study tail behaviour of the distribution of the area under the positive excursion of a random walk which has negative drift and heavy-tailed increments. We determine the asymptotics for tail probabilities for the area.
This note is devoted to the study of the maximum of the excursion of a random walk with negative drift and light-tailed increments. More precisely, we determine the local asymptotics of the joint distribution of the length, maximum and the time at which this maximum is achieved. This result allows one to obtain a local central limit theorems for the length of the excursion conditioned on large values of the maximum.
The Brownian excursion measure is a conformally invariant infinite measure on curves. It figured prominently in one of the first major applications of SLE, namely the explicit calculations of the planar Brownian intersection exponents from which the Hausdorff dimension of the frontier of the Brownian path could be computed (Lawler, Schramm, and Werner, 2001). In this paper we define the simple random walk excursion measure and show that for any bounded, simply connected Jordan domain D, the simple random walk excursion measure on D converges in the scaling limit to the Brownian excursion measu…
We derive a functional central limit theorem for the excursion of a random walk conditioned on sweeping a prescribed geometric area. We assume that the increments of the random walk are integer-valued, centered, with a third moment equal to zero and a finite fourth moment. This result complements the work of \citep{DKW13} where local central limit theorems are provided for the geometric area of the excursion of a symmetric random walk with finite second moments. Our result turns out to be a key tool to derive the scaling limit of the \emph{Interacting Partially-Directed Self-Avoiding Walk} at …
We consider a simple symmetric random walk on a spider, that is a collection of half lines (we call them legs) joined at the origin. Our main question is the following: if the walker makes $n$ steps how high can he go up on all legs. This problem is discussed in two different situations; when the number of legs are increasing, as $n$ goes to infinity and when it is fixed.
In celebration of Professor Ron Doney's 80th birthday, we provide a summary of his academic career and contributions to probability theory, as one of the UK's leading probabilists for over 50 years. A version of this note also serves as an introductory article to the volume in honor of Ron Doney [Birkhäuser, 2021], which includes an additional 17 research papers produced by Ron's colleagues and friends.
We investigate the asymptotic variance of Gaussian nodal excursions in the Euclidean space, focusing on the case where the spectral measure has incommensurable atoms. This study requires to establish fine recurrence properties in 0 for the associated irrational random walk on the torus. We show in particular that the recurrence magnitude depends strongly on the diophantine properties of the atoms, and the same goes for the variance asymptotics of nodal excursions. More specifically, if the spectral measures contains atoms which ratios are well approximable by rationals, the variance is likely …
We consider reflecting random walks on the nonnegative integers with drift of order 1/x at height x. We establish explicit asymptotics for various probabilities associated to such walks, including the distribution of the hitting time of 0 and first return time to 0, and the probability of being at a given height k at time n (uniformly in a large range of k.) In particular, for drift of form -δ/2x + o(1/x) with δ> -1, we show that the probability of a first return to 0 at time n is asymptotically n^{-c}ϕ(n), where c = (3+δ)/2 and ϕis a slowly varying function given explicitly in terms of the o(…
The paper considers excited random walks (ERWs) on integers in i.i.d. environments with a bounded number of excitations per site. The emphasis is primarily on the critical case for the transition between recurrence and transience which occurs when the total expected drift $δ$ at each site of the environment is equal to 1 in absolute value. Several crucial estimates for ERWs fail in the critical case and require a separate treatment. The main results discuss the depth and duration of excursions from the origin for $|δ|=1$ as well as occupation times of negative and positive semi-axes and scalin…
We prove an invariance principle for a class of zero-drift spatially non-homogeneous random walks in $\mathbb{R}^d$, which may be recurrent in any dimension. The limit $\mathcal{X}$ is an elliptic martingale diffusion, which may be point-recurrent at the origin for any $d\geq2$. To characterise $\mathcal{X}$, we introduce a (non-Euclidean) Riemannian metric on the unit sphere in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and use it to express a related spherical diffusion as a Brownian motion with drift. This representation allows us to establish the skew-product decomposition of the excursions of $\mathcal{X}$ and thus …
A rotor configuration on a graph contains in every vertex an infinite ordered sequence of rotors, each is pointing to a neighbor of the vertex. After sampling a configuration according to some probability measure, a rotor walk is a deterministic process: at each step it chooses the next unused rotor in its current location, and uses it to jump to the neighboring vertex to which it points. Rotor walks capture many aspects of the expected behavior of simple random walks. However, this similarity breaks down for the property of having an infinite excursion. In this paper we study that question fo…
We prove an invariance principle for the bridge of a random walk conditioned to stay positive, when the random walk is in the domain of attraction of a stable law, both in the discrete and in the absolutely continuous setting. This includes as a special case the convergence under diffusive rescaling of random walk excursions toward the normalized Brownian excursion, for zero mean, finite variance random walks. The proof exploits a suitable absolute continuity relation together with some local asymptotic estimates for random walks conditioned to stay positive, recently obtained by Vatutin and W…
Consider a random walk with a drift to the right on $\{0,\ldots,k\}$ where $k$ is random and geometrically distributed. We show that the tail $P[T>t]$ of the length $T$ of an excursion from $0$ decreases up to constants like $t^{-\varrho}$ for some $\varrho>0$ but is not regularly varying. We compute the oscillations of $t^\varrho\,P[T>t]$ as $t\to\infty$ explicitly.
We consider a random walk $S$ in the domain of attraction of a standard normal law $Z$, \textit{ie} there exists a positive sequence $a_n$ such that $S_n/a_n$ converges in law towards $Z$. The main result of this note is that the rescaled process $(S_{\lfloor nt \rfloor}/a_n, t \geq 0)$ conditioned to stay non-negative, to start and to come back \textit{near the origin} converges in law towards the normalized brownian excursion.
A Bernoulli random walk is a random trajectory starting from 0 and having i.i.d. increments, each of them being $+1$ or -1, equally likely. The other families cited in the title are Bernoulli random walks under various conditionings. A peak in a trajectory is a local maximum. In this paper, we condition the families of trajectories to have a given number of peaks. We show that, asymptotically, the main effect of setting the number of peaks is to change the order of magnitude of the trajectories. The counting process of the peaks, that encodes the repartition of the peaks in the trajectories, i…
Two fundamental theorems by Spitzer/Erickson and Kesten/Maller on the fluctuation type (positive divergence, negative divergence or oscillation) of a real-valued random walk $(S_{n})_{n\ge 0}$ with iid increments $X_{1},X_{2},\ldots$ and the existence of moments of various related quantities like the first passage into $[x,\infty)$ and the last exit time from $(-\infty,x]$ for arbitrary $x\in\mathbb{R}_{\geqslant}$ are studied in the Markov-modulated situation when the $X_{n}$ are governed by a positive recurrent Markov chain $M=(M_{n})_{n\ge 0}$ on a countable state space $\mathcal{S}$, thus …
Consider a branching random walk on the real line. Madaule showed the renormalized trajectory of an individual selected according to the critical Gibbs measure converges in law to a Brownian meander. Besides, Chen proved that the renormalized trajectory leading to the leftmost individual at time $n$ converges in law to a standard Brownian excursion. In this article, we prove that the renormalized trajectory of an individual selected according to a supercritical Gibbs measure also converges in law toward the Brownian excursion. Moreover, refinements of this results enables to express the probab…
We study discrete-time stochastic processes $(X_t)$ on $[0,\infty)$ with asymptotically zero mean drifts. Specifically, we consider the critical (Lamperti-type) situation in which the mean drift at $x$ is about $c/x$. Our focus is the recurrent case (when $c$ is not too large). We give sharp asymptotics for various functionals associated with the process and its excursions, including results on maxima and return times. These results include improvements on existing results in the literature in several respects, and also include new results on excursion sums and additive functionals of the form…
Consider a nearest-neighbor random walk with certain asymptotically zero drift on the positive half line. Let $M$ be the maximum of an excursion starting from $1$ and ending at $0.$ We study the distribution of $M$ and characterize its asymptotics, which is quite different from those of simple random walks.
Excited random walk is a random walk that has a positive drift to the right when it reaches a vertex it hasn't been to before. We show that in three dimensions the walk drifts to the right in non-zero 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.
An excited random walk is a non-Markovian extension of the simple random walk, in which the walk's behavior at time $n$ is impacted by the path it has taken up to time $n$. The properties of an excited random walk are more difficult to investigate than those of a simple random walk. For example, the limiting speed of an excited random walk is either zero or unknown depending on its initial conditions. While its limiting speed is unknown in most cases, the qualitative behavior of an excited random walk is largely determined by a parameter $δ$ which can be computed explicitly. Despite this, it i…
Excited random walk is a process that has a drift to the right whenever it encounters a new vertex. The paper shows that in two dimensions it drifts to the right linearly in time.
We investigate excited random walks on $\Z^d, d\ge 1,$ and on planar strips $\Z\times\{0,1,...,L-1\}$ which have a drift in a given direction. The strength of the drift may depend on a random i.i.d. environment and on the local time of the walk. We give exact criteria for recurrence and transience, thus generalizing results by Benjamini and Wilson for once-excited random walk on $\Z^d$ and by the author for multi-excited random walk on $\Z$.
We review combinatorial properties of solitons of the Box-Ball system introduced by Takahashi and Satsuma in 1990. Starting with several definitions of the system, we describe ways to identify solitons and review a proof of the conservation of the solitons under the dynamics. Ferrari, Nguyen, Rolla and Wang 2018 proposed a soliton decomposition of a configuration into a family of vectors, one for each soliton size. Based on this decompositions, the authors have proposed a family of measures on the set of excursions which induces invariant distributions for the Box-Ball System. In this paper, w…
We give a "direct" coupling proof of strict monotonicity of the speed for 1-dimensional multi-excited random walks with positive speed. This reproves (and extends) a recent result of Peterson without using branching processes.
We introduce a class of nearest-neighbor integer random walks in random and non-random media, which includes excited random walks considered in the literature. At each site the random walker has a drift to the right, the strength of which depends on the environment at that site and on how often the walker has visited that site before. We give exact criteria for recurrence and transience and consider the speed of the walk.
We consider one-dimensional excited random walks with finitely many cookies at each site. There are certain natural monotonicity results that are known for the excited random walk under some partial orderings of the cookie environments. We improve these monotonicity results to be strictly monotone under a partial ordering of cookie environments introduced by Holmes and Salisbury. While the self-interacting nature of the excited random walk makes a direct coupling proof difficult, we show that there is a very natural coupling of the associated branching process from which the monotonicity resul…
In this paper, we give a detailed construction of an example of excited random walk with speed zero in an ergodic random environment that have an infinite average number of cookies in each site. This example confirms that a result of Mountford, Pimentel and Valle (2006), which gives a sufficient condition for excited random walks in deterministic environment to have positive speed, can not be extended to ergodic random environment.
We analyze random walk in the upper half of a three dimensional lattice which goes down whenever it encounters a new vertex, a.k.a. excited random walk. We show that it is recurrent with an expected number of returns of square-root log n.
We consider a recurrent random walk on a rooted tree in random environment given by a branching random walk. Up to the first return to the root, its edge local times form a Multi-type Galton-Watson tree with countably infinitely many types. When the walk is the diffusive or sub-diffusive, by studying the maximal type of this Galton-Watson tree, we establish the asymptotic behaviour of the largest local times of this walk during n excursions, under the annealed law.
We give non-trivial upper and lower bounds on the range of the so-called Balanced Excited Random Walk in two dimensions, and verify a conjecture of Benjamini, Kozma and Schapira. To the best of our knowledge these are the first non-trivial results for this 2-dimensional model
We consider a class of self-interacting random walks in deterministic or random environments, known as excited random walks or cookie walks, on the d-dimensional integer lattice. The main purpose of this paper is two-fold: to give a survey of known results and some of the methods and to present several new results. The latter include functional limit theorems for transient one-dimensional excited random walks in bounded i.i.d. cookie environments as well as some zero-one laws. Several open problems are stated.
The probability that a one dimensional excited random walk in stationary ergodic and elliptic cookie environment is transient to the right (left) is either zero or one. This solves a problem posed by Kosygina and Zerner [8].
The phase transition of $M$-digging random on a general tree was studied by Collevecchio, Huynh and Kious (2018). In this paper, we study particularly the critical $M$-digging random walk on a superperiodic tree that is proved to be recurrent. We keep using the techniques introduced by Collevecchio, Kious and Sidoravicius (2017) with the aim of investigating the phase transition of Once-excited random walk on general trees. In addition, we prove if $\mathcal T$ is a tree whose branching number is larger than $1$, any multi-excited random walk on $\mathcal{T}$ moving, after excitation, like a s…
We study the asymptotics of the probabilities of extreme slowdown events for transient one-dimensional excited random walks. That is, if $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is a transient one-dimensional excited random walk and $T_n = \min\{ k: \, X_k = n\}$, we study the asymptotics of probabilities of the form $P(X_n \leq n^γ)$ and $P(T_{n^γ} \geq n )$ with $γ< 1$. We show that there is an interesting change in the rate of decay of these extreme slowdown probabilities when $γ< 1/2$.
We study the large deviations of one-dimensional excited random walks. We prove a large deviation principle for both the hitting times and the position of the random walk and give a qualitative description of the respective rate functions. When the excited random walk is transient with positive speed $v_0$, then the large deviation rate function for the position of the excited random walk is zero on the interval $[0,v_0]$ and so probabilities such as $P(X_n < nv)$ for $v \in (0,v_0)$ decay subexponentially. We show that rate of decay for such slowdown probabilities is polynomial of the order $…
We consider one-dimensional excited random walks (ERWs) with periodic cookie stacks in the recurrent regime. We prove functional limit theorems for these walks which extend the previous results of D. Dolgopyat and E. Kosygina for excited random walks with "boundedly many cookies per site." In particular, in the non-boundary recurrent case the rescaled excited random walk converges in the standard Skorokhod topology to a Brownian motion perturbed at its extrema (BMPE). While BMPE is a natural limiting object for excited random walks with boundedly many cookies per site, it is far from obvious w…
We consider the limit behavior of an excited random walk (ERW), i.e., a random walk whose transition probabilities depend on the number of times the walk has visited to the current state. We prove that an ERW being naturally scaled converges in distribution to an excited Brownian motion that satisfies an SDE, where the drift of the unknown process depends on its local time. Similar result was obtained by Raimond and Schapira, their proof was based on the Ray-Knight type theorems. We propose a new method of investigations based on a study of the Radon-Nikodym density of the ERW distribution wit…
We study a model of multi-excited random walk on a regular tree which generalizes the models of the once excited random walk and the digging random walk introduced by Volkov (2003). We show the existence of a phase transition of the recurrence/transience property of the walk. In particular, we prove that the asymptotic behavior of the walk depends on the order of the excitations, which contrasts with the one dimensional setting studied by Zerner (2005). We also consider the limiting speed of the walk in the transient regime and conjecture that it is not a monotonic function of the environment.
Consider the supercritical branching random walk on the real line in the boundary case and the associated Gibbs measure $ν_{n,β}$ on the $n^\text{th}$ generation, which is also the polymer measure on a disordered tree with inverse temperature $β$. The convergence of the partition function $W_{n,β}$, after rescaling, towards a nontrivial limit has been proved by A\"ıdékon and Shi in the critical case $β= 1$ and by Madaule when $β>1$. We study here the near-critical case, where $β_n \to 1$, and prove the convergence of $W_{n,β_n}$, after rescaling, towards a constant multiple of the limit of the…
Let $W$ be an integer valued random variable satisfying $E[W] =: δ\geq 0$ and $P(W<0)>0$, and consider a self-interacting random walk that behaves like a simple symmetric random walk with the exception that on the first visit to any integer $x\in \mathbb{Z}$ the size of the next step is an independent random variable with the same distribution as $W$. We show that this self-interacting random walk is recurrent if $δ\leq 1$ and transient if $δ>1$. This is a special case of our main result which concerns the recurrence and transience of excited random walks (or cookie random walks) with non-near…
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.
Consider two random walks on $\mathbb{Z}$. The transition probabilities of each walk is dependent on trajectory of the other walker i.e. a drift $p>1/2$ is obtained in a position the other walker visited twice or more. This simple model has a speed which is, according to simulations, not monotone in $p$, without apparent "trap" behaviour. In this paper we prove the process has positive speed for $1/2<p<1$, and present a deterministic algorithm to approximate the speed and show the non-monotonicity.
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 consider a discrete-time branching random walk defined on the real line, which is assumed to be supercritical and in the boundary case. It is known that its leftmost position of the $n$-th generation behaves asymptotically like $\frac{3}{2}\ln n$, provided the non-extinction of the system. The main goal of this paper, is to prove that the path from the root to the leftmost particle, after a suitable normalizatoin, converges weakly to a Brownian excursion in $D([0,1],\r)$.
Excited random walks (ERWs) are a self-interacting non-Markovian random walk in which the future behavior of the walk is influenced by the number of times the walk has previously visited its current site. We study the speed of the walk, defined as $V = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \frac{X_n}{n}$ where $X_n$ is the state of the walk at time $n$. While results exist that indicate when the speed is non-zero, there exists no explicit formula for the speed. It is difficult to solve for the speed directly due to complex dependencies in the walk since the next step of the walker depends on how many ti…
We study a class of nearest-neighbor discrete time integer random walks introduced by Zerner, the so called multi-excited random walks. The jump probabilities for such random walker have a drift to the right whose intensity depends on a random or non-random environment that also evolves in time according to the last visited site. A complete description of the recurrence and transience phases was given by Zerner under fairly general assumptions for the environment. We contribute in this paper with some results that allows us to point out if the random walker speed is strictly positive or not in…
The natural analogue for a Levy process of Cramer's estimate for a reflected random walk is a statement about the exponential rate of decay of the tail of the characteristic measure of the height of an excursion above the minimum. We establish this estimate for any Levy process with finite negative mean which satisfies Cramer's condition, and give an explicit formula for the limiting constant. Just as in the random walk case, this leads to a Poisson limit theorem for the number of ``high excursions.''
We prove that, after suitable rescaling, the simple random walk on the trace of a large critical branching random walk converges to the Brownian motion on the integrated super-Brownian excursion.
Using renewal times and Girsanov's transform, we prove that the speed of the excited random walk is infinitely differentiable with respect to the bias parameter in $(0,1)$ for the dimension $d\ge 2$. At the critical point $0$, using a special method, we also prove that the speed is differentiable and the derivative is positive for every dimension $2\leq d\neq 3.$ However, this is not enough to imply that the speed is increasing in a neighborhood of $0.$ It still remains to prove the derivative is continuous at $0$. Moreover, this paper gives some results of monotonicity for $m-$excited random …
