We consider, as proposed and studied in Hofstad et.\ al.\ \cite{HHKR}, a class of graph-based "interacting urn"-type Polya urn model inspired by neuronal processing in the brain where a signal enters the brain at some (randomly) chosen neuron and is transmitted to a (random) single neighbouring neuron with a probability depending on the relative `efficiency' of the synapses connecting the neurons, and in doing so the efficiency of the utilized synapse is improved/reinforced. We study the structures (or architectures) and relative efficiency of the neuronal networks that can arise from repeating this process a very large number of times in a "strong reinforcement regime". Under the most general conditions, we prove in the affirmative a part of the main open conjecture in \cite{HHKR} i.e. the zero probability of convergence of the corresponding "urn process" to any 'unstable' equilibrium. Under very generic conditions, i.e., for an open and dense subset of parameters with full measure, we also prove the full open conjecture by showing the finiteness of the equilibrium set and hence the unit probability of convergence of the "urn process" to some 'stable' equilibrium.
Consider a generalized time-dependent Pólya urn process defined as follows. Let $d\in \mathbb{N}$ be the number of urns/colors. At each time $n$, we distribute $σ_n$ balls randomly to the $d$ urns, proportionally to $f$, where $f$ is a valid reinforcement function. We consider a general class of positive reinforcement functions $\mathcal{R}$ assuming some monotonicity and growth condition. The class $\mathcal{R}$ includes convex functions and the classical case $f(x)=x^α$, $α>1$. The novelty of the paper lies in extending stochastic approximation techniques to the $d$-dimensional case and prov…
We study the long-time asymptotics of a network of weakly reinforced Pólya urns. In this system, which extends the WARM introduced by R. van der Hofstad et. al. (2016) to countable networks, the nodes fire at times given by a Poisson point process. When a node fires, one of the incident edges is selected with a probability proportional to its weight raised to a power $α< 1$, and then this weight is increased by $1$. We show that for $α< 1/2$ on a network of bounded degrees, every edge is reinforced a positive proportion of time, and that the limiting proportion can be interpreted as an equilib…
We consider a version of the classical Pólya urn scheme which incorporates innovations. The space $S$ of colors is an arbitrary measurable set. After each sampling of a ball in the urn, one returns $C$ balls of the same color and additional balls of different colors given by some finite point process $ξ$ on $S$. When the number of steps goes to infinity, the empirical distribution of the colors in the urn converges to the normalized intensity measure of $ξ$, and we analyze the fluctuations. The ratio $ρ= E(C)/E(R)$ of the average number of copies to the average total number of balls returned p…
In this paper, we prove convergence and fluctuation results for measure-valued Pólya processes (MVPPs, also known as Pólya urns with infinitely-many colours). Our convergence results hold almost surely and in $L^2$, under assumptions that are different from that of other convergence results in the literature. Our fluctuation results are the first second-order results in the literature on MVPPs; they generalise classical fluctuation results from the literature on finitely-many-colour Pólya urns. As in the finitely-many-colour case, the order and shape of the fluctuations depend on whether the "…
A competition process is a continuous time Markov chain that can be interpreted as a system of interacting birth-and-death processes, the components of which evolve subject to a competitive interaction. This paper is devoted to the study of the long-term behaviour of such a competition process, where a component of the process increases with a linear birth rate and decreases with a rate given by a linear function of other components. A zero is an absorbing state for each component, that is, when a component becomes zero, it stays zero forever (and we say that this component becomes extinct). W…
We introduce a general two colour interacting urn model on a finite directed graph, where each urn at a node, reinforces all the urns in its out-neighbours according to a fixed, non-negative and balanced reinforcement matrix. We show that the fraction of balls of either colour converges almost surely to a deterministic limit if either the reinforcement is not of Pólya type or if the graph is such that every vertex with non-zero in-degree can be reached from some vertex with zero in-degree. We also obtain joint central limit theorems, with appropriate scaling, around the vector of limiting prop…
In this paper, we prove functional limit theorems for Pólya urn processes whose number of draws and initial number of balls tend to infinity together. This is motivated by recent work of Borovkov [5], where they prove a functional limit theorem for this model when the urn has identity replacement rule. We generalize this result to arbitrary balanced replacement rules (the total number of balls added to the urn is deterministic). Three asymptotic regimes are possible depending on how one lets the number of initial balls scale with the number of draws of the urn. In each regime, we show a first …
A classical Pólya urn scheme is a Markov process whose evolution is encoded by a replacement matrix $(R_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j\leq d}$. At every discrete time-step, we draw a ball uniformly at random, denote its colour $c$, and replace it in the urn together with $R_{c,j}$ balls of colour $j$ (for all $1\leq j\leq d$). We are interested in multi-drawing Pólya urns, where the replacement rule depends on the random drawing of a set of $m$ balls from the urn (with or without replacement). This generalisation has already been studied in the literature, in particular by Kuba & Mahmoud (ArXiv:1503.09069 …
We study several exactly solvable Polya-Eggenberger urn models with a \emph{diminishing} character, namely, balls of a specified color, say $x$ are completely drawn after a finite number of draws. The main quantity of interest here is the number of balls left when balls of color $x$ are completely removed. We consider several diminishing urns studied previously in the literature such as the pills problem, the cannibal urns and the OK Corral problem, and derive exact and limiting distributions. Our approach is based on solving recurrences via generating functions and partial differential equati…
In [arXiv:1906.10951 (forthcoming on Advances in Applied Probability),arXiv:2011.05933 (published on PLOS ONE)] the authors introduce, study and apply a new variant of the Eggenberger-Polya urn, called the "Rescaled" Polya urn, which, for a suitable choice of the model parameters, is characterized by the following features: (i) a "local" reinforcement, i.e. a reinforcement mechanism mainly based on the last observations, (ii) a random persistent fluctuation of the predictive mean, and (iii) a long-term almost sure convergence of the empirical mean to a deterministic limit, together with a chi-…
