English

Cutoff for the Bernoulli-Laplace urn model with $o(n)$ swaps

Probability 2020-02-25 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We study the mixing time of the (n,k)(n,k) Bernoulli--Laplace urn model, where k{0,1,,n}k\in\{0,1,\ldots,n\}. Consider two urns, each containing nn balls, so that when combined they have precisely nn red balls and nn white balls. At each step of the process choose uniformly at random kk balls from the left urn and kk balls from the right urn and switch them simultaneously. We show that if k=o(n)k=o(n), this Markov chain exhibits mixing time cutoff at n4klogn\frac{n}{4k}\log n and window of the order nkloglogn\frac{n}{k}\log\log n. This is an extension of a classical theorem of Diaconis and Shahshahani who treated the case k=1k=1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.07803,
  title  = {Cutoff for the Bernoulli-Laplace urn model with $o(n)$ swaps},
  author = {Alexandros Eskenazis and Evita Nestoridi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.07803},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

To appear in Ann. Inst. Henri Poincar\'e Probab. Stat