Cutoff for generalised Bernoulli-Laplace urn models
Abstract
We introduce a multi-colour multi-urn generalisation of the Bernoulli-Laplace urn model, consisting of urns, colours, and balls, with balls of each colour and 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 on the symmetric group . We study the mixing time of this Markov chain for fixed , , and , as . We show that there is cutoff whenever the chain on 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