English

Cutoff for generalised Bernoulli-Laplace urn models

Probability 2025-11-14 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We introduce a multi-colour multi-urn generalisation of the Bernoulli-Laplace urn model, consisting of dd urns, mm colours, and dmndmn balls, with dndn balls of each colour and mnmn balls in each urn. At each step, one ball is drawn uniformly at random from each urn, and the chosen balls are redistributed among the urns based on a permutation drawn from a distribution μ\mu on the symmetric group SdS_d. We study the mixing time of this Markov chain for fixed mm, dd, and μ\mu, as nn \rightarrow \infty. We show that there is cutoff whenever the chain on [d][d] corresponding to the evolution of a single ball is irreducible, and that the same holds for a labeled version of the model. As an application, we also obtain partial results on cutoff for a card shuffling version of the model in which the cards are labeled and their ordering within each stack matters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.10630,
  title  = {Cutoff for generalised Bernoulli-Laplace urn models},
  author = {Ritesh Goenka and Jonathan Hermon and Dominik Schmid},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.10630},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

61 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:36:23.400Z