Let $A_kA_{k-1}\cdots A_1$ be product of some nonnegative 2-by-2 matrices. In general, its elements are hard to evaluate. Under some conditions, we show that $\forall i,j\in\{1,2\},$ $(A_kA_{k-1}\cdots A_1)_{i,j}\sim c\varrho(A_k)\varrho(A_{k-1})\cdots \varrho(A_1)$ as $k\rightarrow\infty,$ where $\varrho(A_n)$ is the spectral radius of the matrix $A_n$ and $c\in(0,\infty)$ is some constant, so that the elements of $A_kA_{k-1}\cdots A_1$ can be estimated. As applications, consider the maxima of certain excursions of (2,1) and (1,2) random walks with asymptotically zero drifts.
We get some delicate limit theories which are quite different from the ones of simple random walks. Limit theories of both the tail and critical tail sequences of continued fractions play important roles in our studies.
We consider one-dimensional stochastic heat equation with nonlinear drift, $\displaystyle \partial_t u=\frac{1}{2}Δu+b(u)u+σ(u)\dot{W}(t,x)$, where $b:\mathbb{R}_{+}\to \mathbb{R}$ is a continuous function and $σ:\mathbb{R}_{+}\to \mathbb{R}$ is a continuous function with suitable property. We will construct nonnegative solutions to such SPDEs.
We establish large deviation principles and phase transition results for both quenched and annealed settings of nearest-neighbor random walks with constant drift in random nonnegative potentials on $\mathbb Z^d$. We complement the analysis of \cite{Zer}, where a shape theorem on the Lyapunov functions and a large deviation principle in absence of the drift are achieved for the quenched setting.
We consider the simple random walk in i.i.d. nonnegative potentials on the multidimensional cubic lattice. Our goal is to investigate the cost paid by the simple random walk for traveling from the origin to a remote location in a landscape of potentials. In particular, we obtain concentration inequalities for the travel cost in unbounded nonnegative potentials.
We consider matrices whose elements enumerate weights of walks in planar directed weighted graphs (not necessarily acyclic). These matrices are totally nonnegative; more precisely, all their minors are formal power series in edge weights with nonnegative coefficients. A combinatorial explanation of this phenomenon involves loop-erased walks. Applications include total positivity of hitting matrices of Brownian motion in planar domains.
We study a one-dimensional random walk whose expected drift depends both on time and the position of a particle. We establish a non-trivial phase transition for the recurrence vs. transience of the walk, and show some interesting applications to Friedman's urn, as well as showing the connection with Lamperti's walk with asymptotically zero drift.
In this paper we study a sequence of Bouchaud trap models on $\mathbb{Z}$ with drift. We analyze the possible scaling limits for a sequence of walks, where we make the drift decay to 0 as we rescale the walks. Depending on the speed of the decay of the drift we obtain three different scaling limits. If the drift decays slowly as we rescale the walks we obtain the inverse of an α$-stable subordinator as scaling limit. If the drift decays quickly as we rescale the walks, we obtain the F.I.N. diffusion as scaling limit. There is a critical speed of decay separating these two main regimes, where a…
We consider random walks on the nonnegative integers in a space-time dependent random environment. We assume that transition probabilities are given by independent $\mathrm{Beta}(μ,μ)$ distributed random variables, with a specific behaviour at the boundary, controlled by an extra parameter $η$. We show that this model is exactly solvable and prove a formula for the mixed moments of the random heat kernel. We then provide two formulas that allow us to study the large-scale behaviour. The first involves a Fredholm Pfaffian, which we use to prove a local limit theorem describing how the boundary …
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.
Although the theoretical behavior of one-dimensional random walks in random environments is well understood, the numerical evaluation of various characteristics of such processes has received relatively little attention. This paper develops new theory and methodology for the computation of the drift of the random walk for various dependent random environments, including $k$-dependent and moving average environments.
We consider multidimensional discrete valued random walks with nonzero drift killed when leaving general cones of the euclidian space. We find the asymptotics for the exit time from the cone and study weak convergence of the process conditioned on not leaving the cone. We get quasistationarity of its limiting distribution. Finally we construct a version of the random walk conditioned to never leave the cone.
We consider a nearest neighbor random walk on the one-dimensional integer lattice with drift towards the origin determined by an asymptotically vanishing function of the number of visits to zero. We show the existence of distinct regimes according to the rate of decay of the drift. In particular, when the rate is sufficiently slow, the position of the random walk, properly normalized, converges to a symmetric exponential law. In this regime, in contrast to the classical case, the range of the walk scales differently from its position.
Random walks on a group $G$ model many natural phenomena. A random walk is defined by a probability measure $p$ on $G$. We are interested in asymptotic properties of the random walks and in particular in the linear drift and the asymptotic entropy. If the geometry of the group is rich, then these numbers are both positive and the way of dependence on $p$ is itself a property of $G$. In this note, we review recent results about the regularity of the drift and the entropy for free groups, free products and hyperbolic groups.
In this paper we consider finitary symmetric random walks on groups. We construct new possible asymptotics for the drift. We show that the drift can be very close to linear ant yet sublinear. We also give estimates for entropy growth of these random walks. In particular, we prove that there exist infinitely many asymptotics of entropy.
We study the asymptotics for the maximum on a random time interval of a random walk with a long-tailed distribution of its increments and negative drift. We extend to a general stopping time a result by Asmussen (1998), simplify its proof, and give some converses.
We consider random walks with finite second moment which drifts to $-\infty$ and have heavy tail. We focus on the events when the minimum and the final value of this walk belong to some compact set. We first specify the associated probability. Then, conditionally on such an event, we finely describe the trajectory of the random walk. It yields a decomposition theorem with respect to a random time giving a big jump whose distribution can be described explicitly.
We derive a lower bound for the probability that a random walk with i.i.d.\ increments and small negative drift $μ$ exceeds the value $x>0$ by time $N$. When the moment generating functions are bounded in an interval around the origin, this probability can be bounded below by $1-O(x|μ| \log N)$. The approach is elementary and does not use strong approximation theorems.
In many recent studies on random walks with small jumps in the quarter plane, it has been noticed that the so-called "group" of the walk governs the behavior of a number of quantities, in particular through its "order". In this paper, when the "drift" of the random walk is equal to 0, we provide an effective criterion giving the order of this group. More generally, we also show that in all cases where the "genus" of the algebraic curve defined by the kernel is 0, the group is infinite, except precisely for the zero drift case, where finiteness is quite possible.
We study the first exit time $τ$ from an arbitrary cone with apex at the origin by a non-homogeneous random walk (Markov chain) on $\Z^d$ ($d \geq 2$) with mean drift that is asymptotically zero. Specifically, if the mean drift at $\bx \in \Z^d$ is of magnitude $O(\| \bx\|^{-1})$, we show that $τ<\infty$ a.s. for any cone. On the other hand, for an appropriate drift field with mean drifts of magnitude $\| \bx\|^{-β}$, $β\in (0,1)$, we prove that our random walk has a limiting (random) direction and so eventually remains in an arbitrarily narrow cone. The conditions imposed on the random walk a…
Let F be a distribution function with negative mean and regularly varying right tail. Under a mild smoothness condition we derive higher order asymptotic expansions for the tail distribution of the maxima of the random walk generated by F. An application to ruin probabilities is developed.
For a family of random walks $\{S^{(a)}\}$ satisfying $\mathbf{E}S_1^{(a)}=-a<0$ we consider ladder epochs $τ^{(a)}=\min\{k\geq1: S_k^{(a)}<0\}$. We study the asymptotic, as $a\to0$, behaviour of $\mathbf{P}(τ^{(a)}>n)$ in the case when $n=n(a)\to\infty$. As a consequence we obtain also the growth rates of the moments of $τ^{(a)}$.
Self-attractive random walks undergo a phase transition in terms of the applied drift: If the drift is strong enough, then the walk is ballistic, whereas in the case of small drifts self-attraction wins and the walk is sub-ballistic. We show that, in any dimension at least 2, this transition is of first order. In fact, we prove that the walk is already ballistic at critical drifts, and establish the corresponding LLN and CLT.
We show analogs of the classical arcsine theorem for the occupation time of a random walk in $(-\infty,0)$ in the case of a small positive drift. To study the asymptotic behavior of the total time spent in $(-\infty,0)$ we consider parametrized classes of random walks, where the convergence of the parameter to zero implies the convergence of the drift to zero. We begin with shift families, generated by a centered random walk by adding to each step a shift constant $a>0$ and then letting $a$ tend to zero. Then we study families of associated distributions. In all cases we arrive at the same lim…
We consider excited random walk (ERW) on $\mathbb{Z}$ in environments with identical stacks of infinitely many cookies at each site, subject to the constraint that the total drift per site $δ= \sum (2p_j - 1)$ is finite. Building on the methods of Kozma, Orenshtein, and Shinkar (arXiv:1311.7439), we show that ERW in finite-drift environments is recurrent when $|δ|<1$ and transient when $|δ|>1$. In the case $|δ|=1$ we prove that ERW is recurrent under mild assumptions on the environment. In addition, we show that ERW may be transient when $|δ|=1$, an interesting new behavior that was not presen…
Famously, a $d$-dimensional, spatially homogeneous random walk whose increments are non-degenerate, have finite second moments, and have zero mean is recurrent if $d \in \{1,2\}$ but transient if $d \geq 3$. Once spatial homogeneity is relaxed, this is no longer true. We study a family of zero-drift spatially non-homogeneous random walks (Markov processes) whose increment covariance matrix is asymptotically constant along rays from the origin, and which, in any ambient dimension $d \geq 2$, can be adjusted so that the walk is either transient or recurrent. Natural examples are provided by rand…
We study a random walk that has a drift $\fracβ{d}$ to the right when located at a previously unvisited vertex and a drift $\fracμ{d}$ to the left otherwise. We prove that in high dimensions, for every $μ$, the drift to the right is a strictly increasing and continuous function of $β$, and that there is precisely one value $β_0(μ,d)$ for which the resulting speed is zero.
Random walks on $\mathbb{Z}$ with metastable Gaussian distribution caused by linear drift with application to the contact process on the complete graph
We prove central limit theorem under diffusive scaling for the displacement of a random walk on ${\mathbb Z}^d$ in stationary divergence-free random drift field, under the ${\mathcal H}_{-1}$-condition imposed on the drift field. The condition is equivalent to assuming that the stream tensor be stationary and square integrable. This improves the best existing result of Komorowski, Landim and Olla (2012), where it is assumed that the stream tensor be in ${\mathcal L}^{\max\{2+δ,d\}}$, with $δ>0$. Our proof relies on the relaxed sector condition of Horváth, Tóth and Vető (2012), and is technical…
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.
In this note we study dynamical random walks (DRW) with internal states. We consider a particle which performs a dynamical random walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ and whose local dynamics is given by expanding maps. We provide sufficient conditions for the position of the particle $z_n$ to satisfy the Central Limit Theorem.
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.
Consider a random walk $S_n=\sum_{i=0}^n X_i$ with negative drift. This paper deals with upper bounds for the maximum $M=\max_{n\ge 1}S_n$ of this random walk in different settings of power moment existences. As it is usual for deriving upper bounds, we truncate summands. Therefore we use an approach of splitting the time axis by stopping times into intervals of random but finite length and then choose a level of truncation on each interval. Hereby we can reduce the problem of finding upper bounds for $M$ to the problem of finding upper bounds for $M_τ=\max_{n\le τ}S_n$. In addition we test ou…
We compute the exponential decay of the probability that a given multi-dimensional random walk stays in a convex cone up to time $n$, as $n$ goes to infinity. We show that the latter equals the minimum, on the dual cone, of the Laplace transform of the random walk increments. As an example, our results find applications in the counting of walks in orthants, a classical domain in enumerative combinatorics.
By appealing to renewal theory we determine the equations that the mean exit time of a continuous-time random walk with drift satisfies both when the present coincides with a jump instant or when it does not. Particular attention is paid to the corrections ensuing from the non-Markovian nature of the process. We show that when drift and jumps have the same sign the relevant integral equations can be solved in closed form. The case when holding times have the classical Erlang distribution is considered in detail.
Spatially homogeneous random walks in $(\mathbb{Z}_{+})^{2}$ with non-zero jump probabilities at distance at most 1, with non-zero drift in the interior of the quadrant and absorbed when reaching the axes are studied. Absorption probabilities generating functions are obtained and the asymptotic of absorption probabilities along the axes is made explicit. The asymptotic of the Green functions is computed along all different infinite paths of states, in particular along those approaching the axes.
We find uniform lower bounds on the drift for a large family of random walks on graph products, of the form $ \mathbb{P} (|Z_{n}| \leq κn) \leq e ^{-κn} $ for $ κ> 0 $. This includes the simple random walk for a right-angled Artin group with a sparse defining graph. This is done by extending an argument of Gouëzel, along with the combinatorial notion of a piling introduced by Crisp, Godelle, and Wiest. We do not use any moment conditions, instead considering random walks which alternate between one measure uniformly distributed on vertex groups, and another measure over which we make almost no…
Let $G$ be a connected simple real Lie group, $Λ_{0}\subseteq G$ a lattice and $Λ\unlhd Λ_{0}$ a normal subgroup such that $Λ_{0}/Λ\simeq \mathbb{Z}^d$. We study the drift of a random walk on the $\mathbb{Z}^d$-cover $Λ\backslash G$ of the finite volume homogeneous space $Λ_{0}\backslash G$. This walk is defined by a Zariski-dense compactly supported probability measure $μ$ on $G$. We first assume the covering map $Λ\backslash G\rightarrow Λ_{0}\backslash G$ does not unfold any cusp of $Λ_{0}\backslash G$ and compute the drift at \emph{every} starting point. Then we remove this assumption and …
We study critical branching random walks (BRWs) $U^{(n)}$ on~$\mathbb{Z}_{+}$ where for each $n$, the displacement of an offspring from its parent has drift~$2β/\sqrt{n}$ towards the origin and reflection at the origin. We prove that for any~$α>1$, conditional on survival to generation~$[n^α]$, the maximal displacement is asymptotically equivalent to $(α-1)/(4β)\sqrt{n}\log n$. We further show that for a sequence of critical BRWs with such displacement distributions, if the number of initial particles grows like~$yn^α$ for some $y>0$ and $α>1$, and the particles are concentrated in~$[0,O(\sqrt…
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 $(X_n)$ be a Markov chain on a standard borelian space $\mathbb{X}$. Any stopping time $τ$ such that $\mathbb{E}_xτ$ is finite for all $x\in\mathbb{X}$ induces a Markov chain in $\mathbb{X}$. In this article, we show that there is a bijection between the invariant measures for the original chain and for the induced one. We then study drift functions and prove a few relations that link the Markov operator for the original chain and for the induced one. The aim is to use this drift function and the induced operator to link the solution to Poisson's equation $(I\_d-P)g=f$ for the original cha…
We study quantitative asymptotics of planar random walks that are spatially non-homogeneous but whose mean drifts have some regularity. Specifically, we study the first exit time $τ_α$ from a wedge with apex at the origin and interior half-angle $α$ by a non-homogeneous random walk on the square lattice with mean drift at $x$ of magnitude $O(1/|x|)$ as $|x| \to \infty$. This is the critical regime for the asymptotic behaviour: under mild conditions, a previous result of the authors (see arXiv:0910.1772) stated that $τ_α< \infty$ a.s. for any $α$ (while for a stronger drift field $τ_α$ is infin…
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.
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…
We consider a random walk in a fixed Z environment composed of two point types: (q,1-q) and (p,1-p) for 1/2<q<p. We study the expected hitting time at N for a given number k of p-drifts in the interval [1,N-1], and find that this time is minimized asymptotically by equally spaced p-drifts.
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 $\Z$.
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…
Under a natural asumption on the drift, the law of the simple random walk on the multidimensional first quadrant conditioned to always stay in the first octant was obtained by O'Connell in [O]. It coincides with that of the image of the simple random walk under the multidimensional Pitman transform and can be expressed in terms of specializations of Schur functions. This result has been generalized in [LLP1] and [LLP2] for a large class of random walks on weight lattices defined from representations of Kac-Moody algebras and their conditionings to always stay in Weyl chambers. In these various…
We study N interacting random walks on the positive integers. Each particle has drift δ towards infinity, a reflection at the origin, and a drift towards particles with lower positions. This inhomogeneous mean field system is shown to be ergodic only when the interaction is strong enough. We focus on this latter regime, and point out the effect of piles of particles, a phenomenon absent in models of interacting diffusion in continuous space.
We study a continuous time random walk on the $d$-dimensional lattice, subject to a drift and an attraction to large clusters of a subcritical Bernoulli site percolation. We find two distinct regimes: a ballistic one, and a subballistic one taking place when the attraction is strong enough. We identify the speed in the former case, and the algebraic rate of escape in the latter case. Finally, we discuss the diffusive behavior in the case of zero drift and weak attraction.
In this paper we consider a stochastic process that may experience random reset events which bring suddenly the system to the starting value and analyze the relevant statistical magnitudes. We focus our attention on monotonous continuous-time random walks with a constant drift: the process increases between the reset events, either by the effect of the random jumps, or by the action of the deterministic drift. As a result of all these combined factors interesting properties emerge, like the existence|for any drift strength|of a stationary transition probability density function, or the faculty…
