We study a class of nearest-neighbor discrete time integer random walks introduced by Zerner, the so called multi-excited random walks. The jump probabilities for such random walker have a drift to the right whose intensity depends on a random or non-random environment that also evolves in time according to the last visited site. A complete description of the recurrence and transience phases was given by Zerner under fairly general assumptions for the environment. We contribute in this paper with some results that allows us to point out if the random walker speed is strictly positive or not in the transient case for a class of non-random environments.
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.
A random walk on Z^d is excited if the first time it visits a vertex there is a bias in one direction, but on subsequent visits to that vertex the walker picks a neighbor uniformly at random. We show that excited random walk on Z^d, is transient iff d>1.
A zero-one law of Engelbert--Schmidt type is proven for the norm process of a transient random walk. An invariance principle for random walk local times and a limit version of Jeulin's lemma play key roles.
An excited random walk is a non-Markovian extension of the simple random walk, in which the walk's behavior at time $n$ is impacted by the path it has taken up to time $n$. The properties of an excited random walk are more difficult to investigate than those of a simple random walk. For example, the limiting speed of an excited random walk is either zero or unknown depending on its initial conditions. While its limiting speed is unknown in most cases, the qualitative behavior of an excited random walk is largely determined by a parameter $δ$ which can be computed explicitly. Despite this, it i…
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.
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 $\Z$.
We give a "direct" coupling proof of strict monotonicity of the speed for 1-dimensional multi-excited random walks with positive speed. This reproves (and extends) a recent result of Peterson without using branching processes.
We introduce a class of nearest-neighbor integer random walks in random and non-random media, which includes excited random walks considered in the literature. At each site the random walker has a drift to the right, the strength of which depends on the environment at that site and on how often the walker has visited that site before. We give exact criteria for recurrence and transience and consider the speed of the walk.
We consider one-dimensional excited random walks with finitely many cookies at each site. There are certain natural monotonicity results that are known for the excited random walk under some partial orderings of the cookie environments. We improve these monotonicity results to be strictly monotone under a partial ordering of cookie environments introduced by Holmes and Salisbury. While the self-interacting nature of the excited random walk makes a direct coupling proof difficult, we show that there is a very natural coupling of the associated branching process from which the monotonicity resul…
We find formulas for the macroscopic Minkowski and Hausdorff dimensions of the range of an arbitrary transient walk in Z^d. This endeavor solves a problem of Barlow and Taylor (1991).
In this paper, we give a detailed construction of an example of excited random walk with speed zero in an ergodic random environment that have an infinite average number of cookies in each site. This example confirms that a result of Mountford, Pimentel and Valle (2006), which gives a sufficient condition for excited random walks in deterministic environment to have positive speed, can not be extended to ergodic random environment.
We consider a transient random walk on $Z^d$ which is asymptotically stable, without centering, in a sense which allows different norming for each component. The paper is devoted to the asymptotics of the probability of the first return to the origin of such a random walk at time $n$.
We prove strong theorems for the local time at infinity of a nearest neighbor transient random walk. First, laws of the iterated logarithm are given for the large values of the local time. Then we investigate the length of intervals over which the walk runs through (always from left to right) without ever returning.
We consider transient nearest neighbor random walks on the positive part of the real line. We give criteria for the finiteness of the number of cutpoints and strong cutpoints. Examples and open problems are presented.
We analyze random walk in the upper half of a three dimensional lattice which goes down whenever it encounters a new vertex, a.k.a. excited random walk. We show that it is recurrent with an expected number of returns of square-root log n.
An infinite graph G has the property that a random walk in random environment on G defined by i.i.d. resistances with any common distribution is almost surely transient, if and only if for some p<1, simple random walk is transient on a percolation cluster of G under bond percolation with parameter p.
There is a condition (T'), such that it is the necessary condition that a random walk in random environment is ballistic. Under this condition, we show the law of the iterated logarithm for a random walk in random environment.
We give non-trivial upper and lower bounds on the range of the so-called Balanced Excited Random Walk in two dimensions, and verify a conjecture of Benjamini, Kozma and Schapira. To the best of our knowledge these are the first non-trivial results for this 2-dimensional model
An intrinsic branching structure within the transient random walk on a strip in a random environment is revealed. As applications, which enables us to express the hitting time explicitly, and specifies the density of the absolutely continuous invariant measure for the "environments viewed from the particle".
Consider a transient near-critical (1,2) random walk on the positive half line. We give a criteria for the finiteness of the number of the skipped points (the points never visited) by the random walk. This result generalizes (partially) the criteria for the finiteness of the number of cutpoingts of the nearest neighbor random walk on the line by Csáki, Földers, Révész [J Theor Probab (2010) 23: 624-638].
We consider a class of self-interacting random walks in deterministic or random environments, known as excited random walks or cookie walks, on the d-dimensional integer lattice. The main purpose of this paper is two-fold: to give a survey of known results and some of the methods and to present several new results. The latter include functional limit theorems for transient one-dimensional excited random walks in bounded i.i.d. cookie environments as well as some zero-one laws. Several open problems are stated.
The probability that a one dimensional excited random walk in stationary ergodic and elliptic cookie environment is transient to the right (left) is either zero or one. This solves a problem posed by Kosygina and Zerner [8].
The phase transition of $M$-digging random on a general tree was studied by Collevecchio, Huynh and Kious (2018). In this paper, we study particularly the critical $M$-digging random walk on a superperiodic tree that is proved to be recurrent. We keep using the techniques introduced by Collevecchio, Kious and Sidoravicius (2017) with the aim of investigating the phase transition of Once-excited random walk on general trees. In addition, we prove if $\mathcal T$ is a tree whose branching number is larger than $1$, any multi-excited random walk on $\mathcal{T}$ moving, after excitation, like a s…
We study the asymptotics of the probabilities of extreme slowdown events for transient one-dimensional excited random walks. That is, if $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is a transient one-dimensional excited random walk and $T_n = \min\{ k: \, X_k = n\}$, we study the asymptotics of probabilities of the form $P(X_n \leq n^γ)$ and $P(T_{n^γ} \geq n )$ with $γ< 1$. We show that there is an interesting change in the rate of decay of these extreme slowdown probabilities when $γ< 1/2$.
We study the large deviations of one-dimensional excited random walks. We prove a large deviation principle for both the hitting times and the position of the random walk and give a qualitative description of the respective rate functions. When the excited random walk is transient with positive speed $v_0$, then the large deviation rate function for the position of the excited random walk is zero on the interval $[0,v_0]$ and so probabilities such as $P(X_n < nv)$ for $v \in (0,v_0)$ decay subexponentially. We show that rate of decay for such slowdown probabilities is polynomial of the order $…
We consider one-dimensional excited random walks (ERWs) with periodic cookie stacks in the recurrent regime. We prove functional limit theorems for these walks which extend the previous results of D. Dolgopyat and E. Kosygina for excited random walks with "boundedly many cookies per site." In particular, in the non-boundary recurrent case the rescaled excited random walk converges in the standard Skorokhod topology to a Brownian motion perturbed at its extrema (BMPE). While BMPE is a natural limiting object for excited random walks with boundedly many cookies per site, it is far from obvious w…
We consider the limit behavior of an excited random walk (ERW), i.e., a random walk whose transition probabilities depend on the number of times the walk has visited to the current state. We prove that an ERW being naturally scaled converges in distribution to an excited Brownian motion that satisfies an SDE, where the drift of the unknown process depends on its local time. Similar result was obtained by Raimond and Schapira, their proof was based on the Ray-Knight type theorems. We propose a new method of investigations based on a study of the Radon-Nikodym density of the ERW distribution wit…
We study a model of multi-excited random walk on a regular tree which generalizes the models of the once excited random walk and the digging random walk introduced by Volkov (2003). We show the existence of a phase transition of the recurrence/transience property of the walk. In particular, we prove that the asymptotic behavior of the walk depends on the order of the excitations, which contrasts with the one dimensional setting studied by Zerner (2005). We also consider the limiting speed of the walk in the transient regime and conjecture that it is not a monotonic function of the environment.
We prove strong invariance principle between a transient Bessel process and a certain nearest neighbor (NN) random walk that is constructed from the former by using stopping times. It is also shown that their local times are close enough to share the same strong limit theorems. It is shown furthermore, that if the difference between the distributions of two NN random walks are small, then the walks themselves can be constructed so that they are close enough. Finally, some consequences concerning strong limit theorems are discussed.
We consider a left-transient random walk in a random environment on Z that will be disturbed by cookies inducing a drift to the right of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is i.i.d. and independent of the environment. Criteria for recurrence and transience of the random walk are obtained. For this purpose we use subcritical branching processes in random environments with immigration and formulate criteria for recurrence and transience for these processes.
Let $W$ be an integer valued random variable satisfying $E[W] =: δ\geq 0$ and $P(W<0)>0$, and consider a self-interacting random walk that behaves like a simple symmetric random walk with the exception that on the first visit to any integer $x\in \mathbb{Z}$ the size of the next step is an independent random variable with the same distribution as $W$. We show that this self-interacting random walk is recurrent if $δ\leq 1$ and transient if $δ>1$. This is a special case of our main result which concerns the recurrence and transience of excited random walks (or cookie random walks) with non-near…
The following random process on $\Z^4$ is studied. At first visit to a site, the two first coordinates perform a (2-dimensional) simple random walk step. At further visits, it is the last two coordinates which perform a simple random walk step. We prove that this process is almost surely transient. The lower dimensional versions are discussed and various generalizations and related questions are proposed.
We consider random walks in random Dirichlet environment (RWDE) which is a special type of random walks in random environment where the exit probabilities at each site are i.i.d. Dirichlet random variables. On $\Z^d$, RWDE are parameterized by a $2d$-uplet of positive reals. We prove that for all values of the parameters, RWDE are transient in dimension $d\ge 3$. We also prove that the Green function has some finite moments and we characterize the finite moments. Our result is more general and applies for example to finitely generated symmetric transient Cayley graphs. In terms of reinforced r…
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.
We study the boundary of the range of simple random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ in the transient regime $d\ge 3$. We show that volumes of the range and its boundary differ mainly by a martingale. As a consequence, we obtain a bound on the variance of order $n\log n$ in dimension three. We also establish a central limit theorem in dimension four and larger.
We study downward deviations of the boundary of the range of a transient walk on the Euclidean lattice. We describe the optimal strategy adopted by the walk in order to shrink the boundary of its range. The technics we develop apply equally well to the range, and provide pathwise statements for the {\it Swiss cheese} picture of Bolthausen, van den Berg and den Hollander \cite{BBH}.
Consider two random walks on $\mathbb{Z}$. The transition probabilities of each walk is dependent on trajectory of the other walker i.e. a drift $p>1/2$ is obtained in a position the other walker visited twice or more. This simple model has a speed which is, according to simulations, not monotone in $p$, without apparent "trap" behaviour. In this paper we prove the process has positive speed for $1/2<p<1$, and present a deterministic algorithm to approximate the speed and show the non-monotonicity.
We establish recurrence and transience criteria for critical branching processes in random environment with immigration. These results are then applied to discuss recurrence and transience of a recurrent random walk in a random environment on Z that will be disturbed by cookies inducing a drift to the right of strength 1.
In this note we derive an exact formula for the Green's function of the random walk on different subspaces of the discrete lattice (orthants, including the half space, and the strip) without killing on the boundary in terms of the Green's function of the simple random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d\ge 3$.
We consider a one-dimensional transient cookie random walk. It is known from a previous paper that a cookie random walk $(X_n)$ has positive or zero speed according to some positive parameter $α>1$ or $\le 1$. In this article, we give the exact rate of growth of $(X_n)$ in the zero speed regime, namely: for $0<α<1$, $X_n/n^{\frac{α+1}{2}}$ converges in law to a Mittag-Leffler distribution whereas for $α=1$, $X_n(\log n)/n$ converges in probability to some positive constant.
Kesten et al.( 1975) proved the stable law for the transient RWRE (here we refer it as the $κ$-transient RWRE). After that, some similar interesting properties have also been revealed for its continuous counterpart, the diffusion proces in a Brownian environment with drift $κ$. In the present paper we will investigate the connections between these two kind of models, i.e., we will construct a sequence of the $κ$-transient RWREs and prove it convergence to the diffusion proces in a Brownian environment with drift $κ$ by proper scaling. To this end, we need a counterpart convergence for the $κ$-…
An intrinsic multitype branching structure within the transient (1;R)-RWRE is revealed. The branching structure enables us to specify the density of the absolutely continuous invariant measure for the environments seen from the particle and reprove the LLN with an drift explicitly in terms of the environment, comparing with the results in Brémont (2002).
Excited random walks (ERWs) are a self-interacting non-Markovian random walk in which the future behavior of the walk is influenced by the number of times the walk has previously visited its current site. We study the speed of the walk, defined as $V = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \frac{X_n}{n}$ where $X_n$ is the state of the walk at time $n$. While results exist that indicate when the speed is non-zero, there exists no explicit formula for the speed. It is difficult to solve for the speed directly due to complex dependencies in the walk since the next step of the walker depends on how many ti…
Given a simple transient random walk $(S_n)_{n\geq 0}$ in $\mathbf{Z}$ and a stationary sequence of real random variables $(ξ(s))_{s\in \mathbf{Z}}$, we investigate the extremes of the sequence $(ξ(S_n))_{n\geq 0}$. Under suitable conditions, we make explicit the extremal index and show that the point process of exceedances converges to a compound Poisson point process. We give two examples for which the cluster size distribution can be made explicit.
We consider a transient random walk $(X_n)$ in random environment on a Galton--Watson tree. Under fairly general assumptions, we give a sharp and explicit criterion for the asymptotic speed to be positive. As a consequence, situations with zero speed are revealed to occur. In such cases, we prove that $X_n$ is of order of magnitude $n^Λ$, with $Λ\in (0,1)$. We also show that the linearly edge reinforced random walk on a regular tree always has a positive asymptotic speed, which improves a recent result of Collevecchio \cite{Col06}.
We consider a one-dimensional simple symmetric exclusion process in equilibrium, constituting a dynamic random environment for a nearest-neighbor random walk that on occupied/vacant sites has two different local drifts to the right. We construct a renewal structure from which a LLN, a functional CLT and large deviation bounds for the random walk under the annealed measure follow. We further prove an Einstein relation under a suitable perturbation. A brief discussion on the topic of random walks in slowly mixing dynamic random environments is presented.
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 consider a simple random walk (dimension one, nearest neighbour jumps) in a quenched random environment. The goal of this work is to provide sufficient conditions, stated in terms of properties of the environment, under which the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) holds for the position of the walk. Verifying these conditions leads to a complete solution of the problem in the case of independent identically distributed environments as well as in the case of uniformly ergodic (and thus also weakly mixing) environments.
Using renewal times and Girsanov's transform, we prove that the speed of the excited random walk is infinitely differentiable with respect to the bias parameter in $(0,1)$ for the dimension $d\ge 2$. At the critical point $0$, using a special method, we also prove that the speed is differentiable and the derivative is positive for every dimension $2\leq d\neq 3.$ However, this is not enough to imply that the speed is increasing in a neighborhood of $0.$ It still remains to prove the derivative is continuous at $0$. Moreover, this paper gives some results of monotonicity for $m-$excited random …
We prove that the dimension drop phenomenon holds for the harmonic measure associated to a transient random walk in a random environment (as defined by R. Lyons and R. Pemantle in 1992 and generalized by G. Faraud in 2011) on an infinite Galton-Watson tree without leaves. We use regeneration times and ergodic theory techniques from the work of R. Lyons, R. Pemantle and Y. Peres in 1996 to give an explicit construction of the invariant measure for the forward environment seen by the particule at exit times which is absolutely continuous with respect to the joint law of the tree and the path of …
We consider excited random walks on the integers with a bounded number of i.i.d. cookies per site which may induce drifts both to the left and to the right. We extend the criteria for recurrence and transience by M. Zerner and for positivity of speed by A.-L. Basdevant and A. Singh to this case and also prove an annealed central limit theorem. The proofs are based on results from the literature concerning branching processes with migration and make use of a certain renewal structure.
We consider transient random walks in random environment on $\z$ with zero asymptotic speed. A classical result of Kesten, Kozlov and Spitzer says that the hitting time of the level $n$ converges in law, after a proper normalization, towards a positive stable law, but they do not obtain a description of its parameter. A different proof of this result is presented, that leads to a complete characterization of this stable law. The case of Dirichlet environment turns out to be remarkably explicit.
We consider transient random walks on a strip in a random environment. The model was introduced by Bolthausen and Goldsheid [Comm. Math. Phys. 214 (2000) 429--447]. We derive a strong law of large numbers for the random walks in a general ergodic setup and obtain an annealed central limit theorem in the case of uniformly mixing environments. In addition, we prove that the law of the "environment viewed from the position of the walker" converges to a limiting distribution if the environment is an i.i.d. sequence.
We study the entropy of the distribution of the set R_n of vertices visited by a simple random walk on a graph with bounded degrees in its first n steps. It is shown that this quantity grows linearly in the expected size of R_n if the graph is uniformly transient, and sublinearly in the expected size if the graph is uniformly recurrent with subexponential volume growth. This in particular answers a question asked by Benjamini, Kozma, Yadin and Yehudayoff (arXiv:0903.3179v1).
