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 measure on D.
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.
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.
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 approximatio…
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 …
We study the convergence of the $M/G/1$ processor-sharing, queue length process in the heavy traffic regime, in the finite variance case. To do so, we combine results pertaining to Lévy processes, branching processes and queuing theory. These results yield the convergence of long excursions of the queue length processes, toward excursions obtained from those of some reflected Brownian motion with drift, after taking the image of their local time process by the Lamperti transformation. We also show, via excursion theoretic arguments, that this entails the convergence of the entire processes to …
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.
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 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 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.
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…
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 $D([0,1],\r)$.
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.
We determine the large exceedance probabilities and large exceedance paths for the matrix recursive sequence $V_n = M_n V_{n-1} + Q_n, \: n=1,2,\ldots,$ where $\{M_n\}$ is an i.i.d. sequence of $d \times d$ random matrices and $\{ Q_n\}$ is an i.i.d. sequence of random vectors, both with nonnegative entries. Early work on this problem dates to Kesten's (1973) seminal paper, motivated by an application to multi-type branching processes. Other applications arise in financial time series modeling (connected to the study of the GARCH($p,q$) processes) and in physics, and this recursive sequence ha…
Motivated by problems in behavioural finance, we provide two explicit constructions of a randomized stopping time which embeds a given centered distribution $μ$ on integers into a simple symmetric random walk in a uniformly integrable manner. Our first construction has a simple Markovian structure: at each step, we stop if an independent coin with a state-dependent bias returns tails. Our second construction is a discrete analogue of the celebrated Azéma-Yor solution and requires independent coin tosses only when excursions away from maximum breach predefined levels. Further, this construction…
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 prove the power law decay $p(t,x) \sim t^{-ϕ(x,b)/2}$ in which $p(t,x)$ is the probability that the fraction of time up to $t$ in which a random walk $S$ of i.i.d. zero-mean increments taking finitely many values, is non-negative, exceeds $x$ throughout $s \in [1,t]$. Here $ϕ(x,b)= \mathbb{P}(\text{Lévy}(1/2,κ(x,b))<0)$ for $κ(x,b) = \frac{\sqrt{1-x} b - \sqrt{1+x}}{\sqrt{1-x} b + \sqrt{1+x}}$ and $b=b_S \geq 0$ measuring the asymptotic asymmetry between positive and negative excursions of the walk (with $b_s=1$ for symmetric increments).
The number of excursions (finite paths starting and ending at the origin) having a given number of steps and obeying various geometric constraints is a classical topic of combinatorics and probability theory. We prove that the sequence $(e^{\mathfrak{S}}_n)_{n\geq 0}$ of numbers of excursions in the quarter plane corresponding to a nonsingular step set $\mathfrak{S} \subseteq \{0,\pm 1 \}^2$ with infinite group does not satisfy any nontrivial linear recurrence with polynomial coefficients. Accordingly, in those cases, the trivariate generating function of the numbers of walks with given length…
In this article it is shown that the Brownian motion on the continuum random tree is the scaling limit of the simple random walks on any family of discrete $n$-vertex ordered graph trees whose search-depth functions converge to the Brownian excursion as $n\to\infty$. We prove both a quenched version (for typical realisations of the trees) and an annealed version (averaged over all realisations of the trees) of our main result. The assumptions of the article cover the important example of simple random walks on the trees generated by the Galton-Watson branching process, conditioned on the total…
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…
A complete characterization of the possible joint distributions of the maximum and terminal value of uniformly integrable martingale has been known for some time, and the aim of this paper is to establish a similar characterization for continuous martingales of the joint law of the minimum, final value, and maximum, along with the direction of the final excursion. We solve this problem completely for the discrete analogue, that of a simple symmetric random walk stopped at some almost-surely finite stopping time. This characterization leads to robust hedging strategies for derivatives whose val…
In the field of enumeration of walks in cones, it is known how to compute asymptotically the number of excursions (finite paths in the cone with fixed length, starting and ending points, using jumps from a given step set). As it turns out, the associated critical exponent is related to the eigenvalues of a certain Dirichlet problem on a spherical domain. An important underlying question is to decide whether this asymptotic exponent is a (non-)rational number, as this has important consequences on the algebraic nature of the associated generating function. In this paper, we ask whether such an …
We establish scaling limits for the random walk whose state space is the range of a simple random walk on the four-dimensional integer lattice. These concern the asymptotic behaviour of the graph distance from the origin and the spatial location of the random walk in question. The limiting processes are the analogues of those for higher-dimensional versions of the model, but additional logarithmic terms in the scaling factors are needed to see these. The proof applies recently developed machinery relating the scaling of resistance metric spaces and stochastic processes, with key inputs being n…
We give conditions under which a scalar random variable T can be coupled to a random scaling factor $ξ$ such that T and $ξ$T are rendered stochastically independent. A similar result is obtained for random measures. One consequence is a generalization of a result by Pitman and Yor on the Poisson-Dirichlet distribution to its negative parameter range. Another application are diffusion excursions straddling an exponential random time.
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 introduce a new self-interacting random walk on the integers in a dynamic random environment and show that it converges to a pure diffusion in the scaling limit. We also find a lower bound on the diffusion coefficient in some special cases. With minor changes the same argument can be used to prove the scaling limit of the corresponding walk in Z^d.
We consider biased random walks in positive random conductances on the d-dimensional lattice in the zero-speed regime and study their scaling limits. We obtain a functional Law of Large Numbers for the position of the walker, properly rescaled. Moreover, we state a functional Central Limit Theorem where an atypical process, related to the Fractional Kinetics, appears in the limit.
We show that the trace of the null recurrent biased random walk on a Galton-Watson tree properly renormalized converges to the Brownian forest. Our result extends to the setting of the random walk in random environment on a Galton-Watson tree.
It is well known (Donsker's Invariance Principle) that the random walk converges to Brownian motion by scaling. In this paper, we will prove that the scaled local time of the $(1,L)-$random walk converges to that of the Brownian motion. The results was proved by Rogers (1984) in the case $L=1$. Our proof is based on the intrinsic multiple branching structure within the $(1,L)-$random walk revealed by Hong and Wang (2013).
Let $β$ be the growth exponent of the loop-erased random walk (LERW) in three dimensions. We prove that the scaling limit of 3D LERW is $h$-Hölder continuous almost surely for all $h < 1/β$, while not $1/β$-Hölder continuous almost surely.
We prove that the local times of a sequence of Sinai's random walks convergence to those of Brox's diffusion by proper scaling, which is accord with the result of Seignourel (2000). Our proof is based on the convergence of the branching processes in random environment by Kurtz (1979).
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…
