In this paper, we investigate some geometric functionals for band limited Gaussian and isotropic spherical random fields in dimension 2. In particular, we focus on the area of excursion sets, providing its behavior in the high energy limit. Our result is based on Wiener chaos expansion for non linear transform of Gaussian fields and on an explicit derivation on the high-frequency limit of the covariance function of the field. As a simple corollary we establish also the Central Limit Theorem for the excursion area.
In recent years, considerable interest has been drawn by the analysis of geometric functionals for the excursion sets of random eigenfunctions on the unit sphere (spherical harmonics). In this paper, we extend those results to proper subsets of the sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$, i.e., spherical caps, focussing in particular on the excursion area. Precisely, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the excursion area is dominated by the so-called second-order chaos component, and we exploit this result to establish a Quantitative Central Limit Theorem, in the high energy limit. These results generalize …
This paper considers the asymptotic behaviour of volumes of excursion sets of subordinated Gaussian random fields with (possibly) infinite variance. Actually, we consider integral functionals of such fields and obtain their limiting distribution using the Hermite expansion of the integrand. We consider the general non-stationary Gaussian random fields, including stationary and anisotropic special cases. The limiting random variables in our limit theorems have the form of multiple Wiener-Itô integrals. We illustrate most results with corresponding examples.
The high frequency behaviour for random eigenfunctions of the spherical Laplacian has been recently the object of considerable interest, also because of strong motivations arising from Physics and Cosmology. In this paper, we are concerned with the high frequency behaviour of excursion sets; in particular, we establish a Uniform Central Limit Theorem for the empirical measure, i.e. the proportion of spherical surface where spherical Gaussian eigenfunctions lie below a level $z$. Our proofs borrows some techniques from the literature on stationary long memory processes; in particular, we expand…
We give an overview of the recent asymptotic results on the geometry of excursion sets of stationary random fields. Namely, we cover a number of limit theorems of central type for the volume of excursions of stationary (quasi--, positively or negatively) associated random fields with stochastically continuous realizations for a fixed excursion level. This class includes in particular Gaussian, Poisson shot noise, certain infinitely divisible, $α$--stable and max--stable random fields satisfying some extra dependence conditions. Functional limit theorems (with the excursion level being an argum…
We study limit distributions for random variables defined in terms of coefficients of a power series which is determined by a certain linear functional equation. Our technique combines the method of moments with the kernel method of algebraic combinatorics. As limiting distributions the area distributions of the Brownian excursion and meander occur. As combinatorial applications we compute the area laws for discrete excursions and meanders with an arbitrary finite set of steps and the area distribution of column convex polyominoes. As a by-product of our approach we find the joint distribution…
We establish here a Quantitative Central Limit Theorem (in Wasserstein distance) for the Euler-Poincaré Characteristic of excursion sets of random spherical eigenfunctions in dimension 2. Our proof is based upon a decomposition of the Euler-Poincaré Characteristic into different Wiener-chaos components: we prove that its asymptotic behaviour is dominated by a single term, corresponding to the chaotic component of order two. As a consequence, we show how the asymptotic dependence on the threshold level $u$ is fully degenerate, i.e., the Euler-Poincaré Characteristic converges to a single random…
The stable fragmentation with index of self-similarity $α\in [-1/2,0)$ is derived by looking at the masses of the subtrees formed by discarding the parts of a $(1 + α)^{-1}$--stable continuum random tree below height $t$, for $t \geq 0$. We give a detailed limiting description of the distribution of such a fragmentation, $(F(t), t \geq 0)$, as it approaches its time of extinction, $ζ$. In particular, we show that $t^{1/α}F((ζ- t)^+)$ converges in distribution as $t \to 0$ to a non-trivial limit. In order to prove this, we go further and describe the limiting behavior of (a) an excursion of the…
In this paper, we shall be concerned with geometric functionals and excursion probabilities for some nonlinear transforms evaluated on Fourier components of spherical random fields. In particular, we consider both random spherical harmonics and their smoothed averages, which can be viewed as random wavelet coefficients in the continuous case. For such fields, we consider smoothed polynomial transforms; we focus on the geometry of their excursion sets, and we study their asymptotic behaviour, in the high-frequency sense. We focus on the analysis of Euler-Poincaré characteristics, which can be e…
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…
Let M be a compact smooth manifold of dimension n with or without boundary, and f : M $\rightarrow$ R be a smooth Gaussian random field. It is very natural to suppose that for a large positive real u, the random excursion set {f $\ge$ u} is mostly composed of a union of disjoint topological n-balls. Using the constructive part of (stratified) Morse theory we prove that in average, this intuition is true, and provide for large u the asymptotic of the expected number of such balls, and so of connected components of {f $\ge$ u}, see Theorem 1.2. We similarly show that in average, the high nodal s…
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 …
We study here the random fluctuations in the number of critical points with values in an interval $I\subset \mathbb{R}$ for Gaussian spherical eigenfunctions $\left\{f_{\ell }\right\} $, in the high energy regime where $\ell \rightarrow \infty $. We show that these fluctuations are asymptotically equivalent to the centred $L^{2}$-norm of $\left\{ f_{\ell }\right\} $ times the integral of a (simple and fully explicit) function over the interval under consideration. We discuss also the relationships between these results and the asymptotic behaviour of other geometric functionals on the excursio…
The multivariate central limit theorems (CLT) for the volumes of excursion sets of stationary quasi-associated random fields on $\mathbb{R}^d$ are proved. Special attention is paid to Gaussian and shot noise fields. Formulae for the covariance matrix of the limiting distribution are provided. A statistical version of the CLT is considered as well. Some numerical results are also discussed.
A lot of efforts have been devoted in the last decade to the investigation of the high-frequency behaviour of geometric functionals for the excursion sets of random spherical harmonics, i.e., Gaussian eigenfunctions for the spherical Laplacian $Δ_{\mathbf{S}^2}$. In this survey we shall review some of these results, with particular reference to the asymptotic behaviour of variances, phase transitions in the nodal case (the \emph{Berry's Cancellation Phenomenon}), the distribution of the fluctuations around the expected values, and the asymptotic correlation among different functionals. We shal…
In this short note, we build upon some recent results to present a precise expression for the asymptotic variance of the Euler-Poincaré characteristic for the excursion sets of Gaussian eigenfunctions on ${\cal S}^2$.
The excursion set of a $C^2$ smooth random field carries relevant information in its various geometric measures. From a computational viewpoint, one never has access to the continuous observation of the excursion set, but rather to observations at discrete points in space. It has been reported that for specific regular lattices of points in dimensions 2 and 3, the usual estimate of the surface area of the excursions remains biased even when the lattice becomes dense in the domain of observation. In the present work, under the key assumptions of stationarity and isotropy, we demonstrate that th…
We consider a super-Brownian motion $X$. Its canonical measures can be studied through the path-valued process called the Brownian snake. We obtain the limiting behavior of the volume of the $ε$-neighborhood for the range of the Brownian snake, and as a consequence we derive the analogous result for the range of super-Brownian motion and for the support of the integrated super-Brownian excursion. Then we prove the support of $X_t$ is capacity-equivalent to $[0,1]^2$ in $\R^d$, $d\geq 3$, and the range of $X$, as well as the support of the integrated super-Brownian excursion are capacity-equiva…
We study the correlation between the nodal length of random spherical harmonics and the measure of the boundary for excursion sets at any non-zero level. We show that the correlation is asymptotically zero, while the partial correlation after controlling for the random $L^2$-norm on the sphere of the eigenfunctions is asymptotically one.
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…
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 study the limiting occupation density process for a large number of critical and driftless branching random walks. We show that the rescaled occupation densities of $\lfloor sN\rfloor$ branching random walks, viewed as a function-valued, increasing process $\{g_{s}^{N}\}_{s\ge 0}$, converges weakly to a pure jump process in the Skorohod space $\mathbb D([0, +\infty), \mathcal C_{0}(\mathbb R))$, as $N\to\infty$. Moreover, the jumps of the limiting process consist of i.i.d. copies of an Integrated super-Brownian Excursion (ISE) density, rescaled and weighted by the jump sizes in a real-value…
We show that for a suitable class of functions of finitely-many variables, the limit of integrals along slices of a high dimensional sphere is a Gaussian integral on a corresponding finite-codimension affine subspace in infinite dimensions.
In this survey we collect some recent results regarding the Lipschitz-Killing curvatures (LKCs) of the excursion sets of random eigenfunctions on the two-dimensional standard flat torus (arithmetic random waves) and on the two-dimensional unit sphere (random spherical harmonics). In particular, the aim of the present survey is to highlight the key role of integration by parts formulae in order to have an extremely neat expression for the random LKCs. Indeed, the main tool to study local geometric functionals of random waves on manifold is to exploit their Wiener chaos decomposition and show th…
This paper provides quantitative Central Limit Theorems for nonlinear transforms of spherical random fields, in the high frequency limit. The sequences of fields that we consider are represented as smoothed averages of spherical Gaussian eigenfunctions and can be viewed as random coefficients from continuous wavelets/needlets; as such, they are of immediate interest for spherical data analysis. In particular, we focus on so-called needlets polyspectra, which are popular tools for nonGaussianity analysis in the astrophysical community, and on the area of excursion sets. Our results are based on…
We analyze the coupled non-linear integro-differential equations whose solutions is the thermodynamical limit of the empirical correlation and response functions in the Langevin dynamics for spherical p-spin disordered mean-field models. We provide a mathematically rigorous derivation of their FDT solution (for the high temperature regime) and of certain key properties of this solution, which are in agreement with earlier derivations based on physical grounds.
We consider sequences of needlet random fields defined as weighted averaged forms of spherical Gaussian eigenfunctions. Our main result is a Central Limit Theorem in the high energy setting, for the boundary lengths of their excursion sets. This result is based on Stein-Malliavin techniques and Wiener chaos expansion for nonlinear functionals of random fields. To this end, a careful analysis of the variances of each chaotic component of the boundary length is carried out, showing that they are asymptotically constant, after normalisation, for all terms of the expansion and no leading component…
In this paper we give a complete characterization of the scaling limit of the critical Interacting Partially Directed Self-Avoiding Walk (IPDSAW) introduced in Zwanzig and Lauritzen (1968). As the system size $L$ diverges, we prove that the set of occupied sites, rescaled horizontally by $L^{2/3}$ and vertically by $L^{1/3}$ converges in law for the Hausdorff distance towards a non trivial random set. This limiting set is built with a Brownian motion $B$ conditioned to come back at the origin at $a_1$ the time at which its geometric area reaches $1$. The modulus of $B$ up to $a_1$ gives the he…
Consider a family of random ordered graph trees $(T_n)_{n\geq 1}$, where $T_n$ has $n$ vertices. It has previously been established that if the associated search-depth processes converge to the normalised Brownian excursion when rescaled appropriately as $n\rightarrow\infty$, then the simple random walks on the graph trees have the Brownian motion on the Brownian continuum random tree as their scaling limit. Here, this result is extended to demonstrate the existence of a diffusion scaling limit whenever the volume measure on the limiting real tree is nonatomic, supported on the leaves of the l…
We consider a spherical spin system with pure 2-spin spherical Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian with ferromagnetic Curie-Weiss interaction. The system shows a two-dimensional phase transition with respect to the temperature and the coupling constant. We compute the limiting distributions of the free energy for all parameters away from the critical values. The zero temperature case corresponds to the well-known phase transition of the largest eigenvalue of a rank 1 spiked random symmetric matrix. As an intermediate step, we establish a central limit theorem for the linear statistics of rank …
We show that the limiting ground state energy of the spherical mixed p-spin model can be identified as the infimum of certain variational problem. This complements the well-known Parisi formula for the limiting free energy in the spherical model. As an application, we obtain explicit formulas for the limiting ground state energy in the replica symmetry, one level of replica symmetry breaking and full replica symmetry breaking phases at zero temperature. In addition, our approach leads to new results on disorder chaos in spherical mixed even p-spin models. In particular, we prove that when ther…
We describe the fluctuations of the overlap between two replicas in the 2-spin spherical SK model about its limiting value in the low temperature phase. We show that the fluctuations are of order $N^{-1/3}$ and are given by a simple, explicit function of the eigenvalues of a matrix from the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble. We show that this quantity converges and describe its limiting distribution in terms of the Airy1random point field (i.e., the joint limit of the extremal eigenvalues of the GOE) from random matrix theory.
By using the independence structure of points following a determinantal point process, we study the radii of the spherical ensemble, the truncation of the circular unitary ensemble and the product ensemble with parameter n and k. The limiting distributions of the three radii are obtained. They are not the Tracy-Widom distribution. In particular, for the product ensemble, we show that the limiting distribution has a transition phenomenon: when k/n -> 0, k/n -> a in (0,infty) and k/n -> infty, the liming distribution is the Gumbel distribution, a new distribution $μ$ and the logarithmic normal d…
We consider Gaussian random waves on hyperbolic spaces and establish variance asymptotics and central limit theorems for a large class of their integral functionals, both in the high-frequency and large domain limits. Our strategy of proof relies on a fine analysis of Wiener chaos expansions, which in turn requires us to analytically assess the fluctuations of integrals involving mixed moments of covariance kernels. Our results complement several recent findings on non-linear transforms of planar and arithmetic random waves, as well as of random spherical harmonics. In the particular case of 2…
The coherence of a random matrix, which is defined to be the largest magnitude of the Pearson correlation coefficients between the columns of the random matrix, is an important quantity for a wide range of applications including high-dimensional statistics and signal processing. Inspired by these applications, this paper studies the limiting laws of the coherence of $n\times p$ random matrices for a full range of the dimension $p$ with a special focus on the ultra high-dimensional setting. Assuming the columns of the random matrix are independent random vectors with a common spherical distribu…
We prove a metric space scaling limit for a critical random graph with independent and identically distributed degrees having power-law tail behaviour with exponent $α+1$, where $α\in (1,2)$. The limiting components are constructed from random $\mathbb{R}$-trees encoded by the excursions above its running infimum of a process whose law is locally absolutely continuous with respect to that of a spectrally positive $α$-stable Lévy process. These spanning $\mathbb{R}$-trees are measure-changed $α$-stable trees. In each such $\mathbb{R}$-tree, we make a random number of vertex-identifications, who…
We investigate both free energy and complexity of the spherical bipartite spin glass model. We first prove a variational formula in high temperature for the limiting free energy based on the well-known Crisanti-Sommers representation of the mixed p-spin spherical model. Next, we show that the mean number of local minima at low levels of energy is exponentially large in the size of the system and we derive a bound on the location of the ground state energy.
We consider $Z^d$, with d bigger or equal to three. We investigate the vacant set of random interlacements in the strongly percolative regime, the vacant set of the simple random walk, and the excursion set above a given level of the Gaussian free field in the strongly percolative regime. We derive asymptotic upper and lower exponential bounds for the large deviation probability that the adequately thickened component of the boundary of a large box centered at the origin in the respective vacant sets or excursion set leaves in the box a macroscopic volume in its complement. We also derive geom…
We study the limiting distribution of critical points and extrema of random spherical harmonics, in the high energy limit. In particular, we first derive the density functions of extrema and saddles; we then provide analytic expressions for the variances and we show that the empirical measures in the high-energy limits converge weakly to their expected values. Our arguments require a careful investigation of the validity of the Kac-Rice formula in nonstandard circumstances, entailing degeneracies of covariance matrices for first and second derivatives of the processes being analyzed.
The concept of typical and weighted typical spherical faces for tessellations of the $d$-dimensional unit sphere, generated by $n$ independent random great hyperspheres distributed according to a non-degenerate directional distribution, is introduced and studied. Probabilistic interpretations for such spherical faces are given and their directional distributions are determined. Explicit formulas for the expected $f$-vector, the expected spherical Quermaßintegrals and the expected spherical intrinsic volumes are found in the isotropic case. Their limiting behaviour as $n\to\infty$ is discussed …
A marked lattice is a $d$-dimensional Euclidean lattice, where each lattice point is assigned a mark via a given random field on ${\mathbb Z}^d$. We prove that, if the field is strongly mixing with a faster-than-logarithmic rate, then for every given lattice and almost every marking, large spheres become equidistributed in the space of marked lattices. A key aspect of our study is that the space of marked lattices is not a homogeneous space, but rather a non-trivial fiber bundle over such a space. As an application, we prove that the free path length in a crystal with random defects has a limi…
We study the large-$N$ limit of the Segal--Bargmann transform on $S^{N-1}(\sqrt N)$, the $(N-1)$-dimensional sphere of radius $\sqrt N$, as a unitary map from the space of square-integrable functions with respect to the normalized spherical measure onto the space of holomorphic square-integrable functions with respect to a certain measure on the quadric. In particular, we give an explicit formulation and describe the geometric models for the limit of the domain, the limit of the range, and the limit of the transform when $N$ tends to infinity. We show that the limiting transform is still a uni…
