English

Multiple drawing multi-colour urns by stochastic approximation

Probability 2021-06-18 v6

Abstract

A classical P\'olya urn scheme is a Markov process whose evolution is encoded by a replacement matrix (Ri,j)1i,jd(R_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j\leq d}. At every discrete time-step, we draw a ball uniformly at random, denote its colour cc, and replace it in the urn together with Rc,jR_{c,j} balls of colour jj (for all 1jd1\leq j\leq d). We are interested in multi-drawing P\'olya urns, where the replacement rule depends on the random drawing of a set of mm balls from the urn (with or without replacement). This generalisation has already been studied in the literature, in particular by Kuba & Mahmoud (ArXiv:1503.09069 and 1509.09053), where second order asymptotic results are proved for 22-colour urns under the balanced and the affinity assumptions. The main idea of this work is to apply stochastic approximation methods to this problem, which enables us to remove the affinity hypothesis of Kuba & Mahmoud and generalise the result to more-than-two-colour urns. We also give some partial results in the two-colour non-balanced case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.09090,
  title  = {Multiple drawing multi-colour urns by stochastic approximation},
  author = {Nabil Lasmar and Cécile Mailler and Olfa Selmi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.09090},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

This new arxiv version (v6) corrects a mistake that we discovered in the previous versions of this paper (v1-5). The mistake was in Theorem 1$(a)$ and in the last sentence of Theorem 4. In this new version, Theorem 1$(a)$ has been corrected, and Theorem 4 has been deleted

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:06:13.964Z