Random walks on general graphs play an important role in the understanding of the general theory of stochastic processes. Beyond their fundamental interest in probability theory, they arise also as simple models of physical systems. A brief survey of the physical relevance of the notion of random walk on both undirected and directed graphs is given followed by the exposition of some recent results on random walks on randomly oriented lattices.
It is worth noticing that general undirected graphs are associated with (not necessarily Abelian) groups while directed graphs are associated with (not necessarily Abelian) $C^*$-algebras. Since quantum mechanics is naturally formulated in terms of $C^*$-algebras, the study of random walks on directed lattices has been motivated lately by the development of the new field of quantum information and communication.
Simple random walks on various types of partially horizontally oriented regular lattices are considered. The horizontal orientations of the lattices can be of various types (deterministic or random) and depending on the nature of the orientation the asymptotic behaviour of the random walk is shown to be recurrent or transient. In particular, for randomly horizontally oriented lattices the random walk is almost surely transient.
In the randomly-oriented Manhattan lattice, every line in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is assigned a uniform random direction. We consider the directed graph whose vertex set is $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and whose edges connect nearest neighbours, but only in the direction fixed by the line orientations. Random walk on this directed graph chooses uniformly from the $d$ legal neighbours at each step. We prove that this walk is superdiffusive in two and three dimensions. The model is diffusive in four and more dimensions.
Simple random walks on a partially directed version of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ are considered. More precisely, vertical edges between neighbouring vertices of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ can be traversed in both directions (they are undirected) while horizontal edges are one-way. The horizontal orientation is prescribed by a random perturbation of a periodic function, the perturbation probability decays according to a power law in the absolute value of the ordinate. We study the type of the simple random walk, i.e.\ its being recurrent or transient, and show that there exists a critical value of the decay power, ab…
We give a complete classification of scaling limits of randomly trapped random walks and associated clock processes on $\mathbb Z^d$, $d\ge 2$. Namely, under the hypothesis that the discrete skeleton of the randomly trapped random walk has a slowly varying return probability, we show that the scaling limit of its clock process is either deterministic linearly growing or a stable subordinator. In the case when the discrete skeleton is a simple random walk on $\mathbb Z^d$, this implies that the scaling limit of the randomly trapped random walk is either Brownian motion or the Fractional Kinetic…
We consider the randomly biased random walk on trees in the slow movement regime as in [HS16], whose potential is given by a branching random walk in the boundary case. We study the heavy range up to the $n$-th return to the root, i.e., the number of edges visited more than $k_n$ times. For $k_n=n^θ$ with $θ\in(0,1)$, we obtain the convergence in probability of the rescaled heavy range, which improves one result of [AD20].
We prove CLTs for biased randomly trapped random walks in one dimension. In particular, we will establish an annealed invariance principal by considering a sequence of regeneration times under the assumption that the trapping times have finite second moment. In a quenched environment, an environment dependent centring is determined which is necessary to achieve a central limit theorem. As our main motivation, we apply these results to biased walks on subcritical Galton-Watson trees conditioned to survive and prove a tight bound on the bias required to obtain such limiting behaviour.
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 introduce a general model of trapping for random walks on graphs. We give the possible scaling limits of these Randomly Trapped Random Walks on $\mathbb {Z}$. These scaling limits include the well-known fractional kinetics process, the Fontes-Isopi-Newman singular diffusion as well as a new broad class we call spatially subordinated Brownian motions. We give sufficient conditions for convergence and illustrate these on two important examples.
We study the recurrence behaviour of random walks on partially oriented honeycomb lattices. The vertical edges are undirected while the orientation of the horizontal edges is random: depending on their distribution, we prove a.s. transience in some cases, and a.s. recurrence in other ones. The results extend those obtained for the partially oriented square grid lattices (Campanino and Petritis (2003), Campanino and Petritis (2014)).
We are interested in the randomly biased random walk on the supercritical Galton--Watson tree. Our attention is focused on a slow regime when the biased random walk $(X_n)$ is null recurrent, making a maximal displacement of order of magnitude $(\log n)^3$ in the first $n$ steps. We study the localization problem of $X_n$ and prove that the quenched law of $X_n$ can be approximated by a certain invariant probability depending on $n$ and the random environment. As a consequence, we establish that upon the survival of the system, $\frac{|X_n|}{(\log n)^2}$ converges in law to some non-degenerate…
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…
We consider random variables observed at arrival times of a renewal process, which possibly depends on those observations and has regularly varying steps with infinite mean. Due to the dependence and heavy tailed steps, the limiting behavior of extreme observations until a given time $t$ tends to be rather involved. We describe this asymptotics and generalize several partial results which appeared in this setting. In contrast to the earlier studies, our analysis is based in the point processes theory. The theory is applied to determine the asymptotic distribution of maximal excursions and sojo…
Erdős and Révész initiated the study of favorite sites by considering the one-dimensional simple random walk. We investigate in this paper the same problem for a class of null-recurrent randomly biased walks on a supercritical Gaton-Watson tree. We prove that there is some parameter $κ\in (1, \infty]$ such that the set of the favorite sites of the biased walk is almost surely bounded in the case $κ\in (2, \infty]$, tight in the case $κ=2$, and oscillates between a neighborhood of the root and the boundary of the range in the case $κ\in (1, 2)$. Moreover, our results yield a complete answer to …
Random walks in random scenery are processes defined by $Z_n:=\sum_{k=1}^nξ_{X_1+...+X_k}$, where $(X_k,k\ge 1)$ and $(ξ_y,y\in\mathbb Z)$ are two independent sequences of i.i.d. random variables. We assume here that their distributions belong to the normal domain of attraction of stable laws with index $α\in (0,2]$ and $β\in (0,2]$ respectively. These processes were first studied by H. Kesten and F. Spitzer, who proved the convergence in distribution when $α\neq 1$ and as $n\to \infty$, of $n^{-δ}Z_n$, for some suitable $δ>0$ depending on $α$ and $β$. Here we are interested in the convergence…
Consider a randomly-oriented two dimensional Manhattan lattice where each horizontal line and each vertical line is assigned, once and for all, a random direction by flipping independent and identically distributed coins. A deterministic walk is then started at the origin and at each step moves diagonally to the nearest vertex in the direction of the horizontal and vertical lines of the present location. This definition can be generalized, in a natural way, to larger dimensions, but we mainly focus on the two dimensional case. In this context the process localizes on two vertices at all large …
As a model of trapping by biased motion in random structure, we study the time taken for a biased random walk to return to the root of a subcritical Galton-Watson tree. We do so for trees in which these biases are randomly chosen, independently for distinct edges, according to a law that satisfies a logarithmic non-lattice condition. The mean return time of the walk is in essence given by the total conductance of the tree. We determine the asymptotic decay of this total conductance, finding it to have a pure power-law decay. In the case of the conductance associated to a single vertex at maxim…
We consider a random walk on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree with leaves, where the transition probabilities of the walk are determined by biases that are randomly assigned to the edges of the tree. The biases are chosen independently on distinct edges, each one according to a given law that satisfies a logarithmic non-lattice condition. We determine the condition under which the walk is sub-ballistic, and, in the sub-ballistic regime, we find a formula for the exponent gamma (which is positive but less than one) such that the distance | X_n | moved by the walk in time n is of the order of …
Consider the braid group $B_3=< a,b| aba=bab>$ and the nearest neighbor random walk defined by a probability $ν$ with support $\{a,a^{-1},b,b^{-1}\}$. The rate of escape of the walk is explicitly expressed in function of the unique solution of a set of eight polynomial equations of degree three over eight indeterminates. We also explicitly describe the harmonic measure of the induced random walk on $B_3$ quotiented by its center. The method and results apply, mutatis mutandis, to nearest neighbor random walks on dihedral Artin groups.
We recall the directed graph of _juggling states_, closed walks within which give juggling patterns, as studied by Ron Graham in [w/Chung, w/Butler]. Various random walks in this graph have been studied before by several authors, and their equilibrium distributions computed. We motivate a random walk on the reverse graph (and an enrichment thereof) from a very classical linear algebra problem, leading to a particularly simple equilibrium: a Boltzmann distribution closely related to the Poincaré series of the b-Grassmannian in infinite-dimensional space. We determine the most likely asymptotic …
A random walk is a basic stochastic process on graphs and a key primitive in the design of distributed algorithms. One of the most important features of random walks is that, under mild conditions, they converge to a stationary distribution in time that is at most polynomial in the size of the graph. This fundamental property, however, only holds if the graph does not change over time, while on the other hand many distributed networks are inherently dynamic, and their topology is subjected to potentially drastic changes. In this work we study the mixing (i.e., converging) properties of random …
We study the continuous time version of the random walk pinning model, where conditioned on a continuous time random walk Y on Z^d with jump rate ρ>0, which plays the role of disorder, the law up to time t of a second independent random walk X with jump rate 1 is Gibbs transformed with weight e^{βL_t(X,Y)}, where L_t(X,Y) is the collision local time between X and Y up to time t. As the inverse temperature βvaries, the model undergoes a localization-delocalization transition at some critical β_c>=0. A natural question is whether or not there is disorder relevance, namely whether or not β_c diff…
We prove the existence of scaling limits for the projection on the backbone of the random walks on the Incipient Infinite Cluster and the Invasion Percolation Cluster on a regular tree. We treat these projected random walks as randomly trapped random walks (as defined in [BCČR15]) and thus describe these scaling limits as spatially subordinated Brownian motions
We prove a non-standard functional limit theorem for a two dimensional simple random walk on some randomly oriented lattices. This random walk, already known to be transient, has different horizontal and vertical fluctuations leading to different normalizations in the functional limit theorem, with a non-Gaussian horizontal behavior. We also prove that the horizontal and vertical components are not asymptotically independent.
We consider an analogue of the Kac random walk on the special orthogonal group $SO(N)$, in which at each step a random rotation is performed in a randomly chosen 2-plane of $\bR^N$. We obtain sharp asymptotics for the rate of convergence in total variance distance, establishing a cut-off phenomenon in the large $N$ limit. In the special case where the angle of rotation is deterministic this confirms a conjecture of Rosenthal \cite{Rosenthal}. Under mild conditions we also establish a cut-off for convergence of the walk to stationarity under the $L^2$ norm. Depending on the distribution of the …
We study the range of a planar random walk on a randomly oriented lattice, already known to be transient. We prove that the expectation of the range grows linearly, in both the quenched (for a.e. orientation) and annealed ("averaged") cases. We also express the rate of growth in terms of the quenched Green function and eventually prove a weak law of large numbers in the (non-Markovian) annealed case.
This paper studies the random walk on the hypercube $(\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z})^n$ which at each step flips $k$ randomly chosen coordinates. We prove that the mixing time for this walk is of order $\frac{n}{k} \log n$. We also prove that if $k=o(n)$, then the walk exhibits cutoff at $\frac{n}{2k} \log n$ with window $\frac{n}{2k} $.
We study the quenched behaviour of a perturbed version of the simple symmetric random walk on the set of integers. The random walker moves symmetrically with an exception of some randomly chosen sites where we impose a random drift. We show that if the gaps between the marked sites are i.i.d. and regularly varying with a sufficiently small index, then there is no strong quenched limit laws for the position of the random walker. As a consequence we study the quenched limit laws in the context of weak convergence of random measures.
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 …
We prove a quenched central limit theorem for random walks with bounded increments in a randomly evolving environment on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. We assume that the transition probabilities of the walk depend not too strongly on the environment and that the evolution of the environment is Markovian with strong spatial and temporal mixing properties.
The extremal process of a branching random walk is the point measure recording the position of particles alive at time $n$, shifted around the expected position of the minimal position. Madaule proved that this point measure converges, as $n \to \infty$, toward a randomly shifted, decorated Poisson point process. In this article, we study the joint convergence of the extremal process together with its genealogical informations. This result is then used to describe the law of the decoration in the limiting process, as well as to study the supercritical Gibbs measures of the branching random wal…
The Tree Builder Random Walk is a special random walk that evolves on trees whose size increases with time, randomly and depending upon the walker. After every s steps of the walker, a random number of vertices are added to the tree and attached to the current position of the walker. These processes share similarities with other important classes of markovian and non-markovian random walks presenting a large variety of behaviors according to parameters specifications. We show that for a large and most significant class of tree builder random walks, the process is either null recurrent or trans…
We study a discrete-time random walk on the non-negative integers, such that when 0 is reached a jump occurs to an arbitrary location, with given probabilities. We obtain an asymptotic formula for the expected position at large times, in dependence on the jump probabilities and on the starting position. Our proof of this result displays the relevance of the spectral analysis of the transition operator associated to the stochastic process, both of its eigenvalues and of its resonances.
This paper focuses on the problem of modeling for small world effect on complex networks. Let's consider the supercritical Poisson continuous percolation on $d$-dimensional torus $T^d_n$ with volume $n^d$. By adding "long edges (short cuts)" randomly to the largest percolation cluster, we obtain a random graph $\mathscr G_n$. In the present paper, we first prove that the diameter of $\mathscr G_n$ grows at most polynomially fast in $\ln n$ and we call it the Poisson Geometry Small World. Secondly, we prove that the random walk on $\mathscr G_n$ possesses the rapid mixing property, namely, the …
The rotor-router model on a graph describes a discrete-time walk accompanied by the deterministic evolution of configurations of rotors randomly placed on vertices of the graph. We prove the following property: if at some moment of time, the rotors form a closed clockwise contour on the planar graph, then the clockwise rotations of rotors generate a walk which enters into the contour at some vertex $v$, performs a number of steps inside the contour so that the contour formed by rotors becomes anti-clockwise, and then leaves the contour at the same vertex $v$. This property generalizes the prev…
We consider a random walk in random environment with random holding times, that is, the random walk jumping to one of its nearest neighbors with some transition probability after a random holding time. Both the transition probabilities and the laws of the holding times are randomly distributed over the integer lattice. Our main result is a quenched large deviation principle for the position of the random walk. The rate function is given by the Legendre transform of the so-called Lyapunov exponents for the Laplace transform of the first passage time. By using this representation, we derive some…
We study the limit behaviour of a class of random walk models taking values in the $d$-dimensional unit standard simplex, $d\ge 1$, defined as follows. From an interior point $z$, the process chooses one of the $d+1$ vertices of the simplex, with probabilities depending on $z$, and then the particle randomly jumps to a new location $z'$ on the segment connecting $z$ to the chosen vertex. In some specific cases, using properties of the Beta distribution, we prove that the limiting distributions of the Markov chain are, in fact, Dirichlet. We also consider a related history-dependent random walk…
We derive an annealed large deviation principle for the normalised local times of a continuous-time random walk among random conductances in a finite domain in $\Z^d$ in the spirit of Donsker-Varadhan \cite{DV75}. We work in the interesting case that the conductances may assume arbitrarily small values. Thus, the underlying picture of the principle is a joint strategy of small values of the conductances and large holding times of the walk. The speed and the rate function of our principle are explicit in terms of the lower tails of the conductance distribution. As an application, we identify th…
We introduce random walks in a sparse random environment on $\mathbb Z$ and investigate basic asymptotic properties of this model, such as recurrence-transience, asymptotic speed, and limit theorems in both the transient and recurrent regimes. The new model combines features of several existing models of random motion in random media and admits a transparent physical interpretation. More specifically, a random walk in a sparse random environment can be characterized as a "locally strong" perturbation of a simple random walk by a random potential induced by "rare impurities," which are randomly…
Jim Propp's P-machine, also known as the "rotor router model" is a simple deterministic process that simulates a random walk on a graph. Instead of distributing chips to randomly chosen neighbors, it serves the neighbors in a fixed order. We investigate how well this process simulates a random walk. For the graph being the infinite path, we show that, independent of the starting configuration, at each time and on each vertex, the number of chips on this vertex deviates from the expected number of chips in the random walk model by at most a constant c_1, which is approximately 2.29. For interva…
We consider the thick points of random walk, i.e. points where the local time is a fraction of the maximum. In two dimensions, we answer a question of Dembo, Peres, Rosen and Zeitouni and compute the number of thick points of planar random walk, assuming that the increments are symmetric and have a finite moment of order two. The proof provides a streamlined argument based on the connection to the Gaussian free field and works in a very general setting including isoradial graphs. In higher dimensions, we study the scaling limit of the thick points. In particular, we show that the rescaled numb…
Jim Propp's rotor router model is a deterministic analogue of a random walk on a graph. Instead of distributing chips randomly, each vertex serves its neighbors in a fixed order. We analyze the difference between Propp machine and random walk on the infinite two-dimensional grid. It is known that, apart from a technicality, independent of the starting configuration, at each time, the number of chips on each vertex in the Propp model deviates from the expected number of chips in the random walk model by at most a constant. We show that this constant is approximately 7.8, if all vertices serve t…
The mixer chain on a graph G is the following Markov chain. Place tiles on the vertices of G, each tile labeled by its corresponding vertex. A "mixer" moves randomly on the graph, at each step either moving to a randomly chosen neighbor, or swapping the tile at its current position with some randomly chosen adjacent tile. We study the mixer chain on Z, and show that at time t the expected distance to the origin is t^{3/4}, up to constants. This is a new example of a random walk on a group with rate of escape strictly between t^{1/2} and t.
For a distribution $F^{*τ}$ of a random sum $S_τ=ξ_1+...+ξ_τ$ of i.i.d. random variables with a common distribution $F$ on the half-line $[0,\infty)$, we study the limits of the ratios of tails $\bar{F^{*τ}}(x)/\bar{F}(x)$ as $x\to\infty$ (here, $τ$ is a counting random variable which does not depend on $\{ξ_n\}_{n\ge1}$). We also consider applications of the results obtained to random walks, compound Poisson distributions, infinitely divisible laws, and subcritical branching processes.
