Preferential attachment when stable

From MaRDI portal



Abstract: We study an urn process with two urns, initialized with a ball each. Balls are added sequentially, the urn being chosen independently with probability proportional to the alphath power (alpha>1) of the existing number of balls. We study the (rare) event that the urn compositions are balanced after the addition of 2n−2 new balls. We derive precise asymptotics of the probability of this event by embedding the process in continuous time. Quite surprisingly, a fine control on this probability may be leveraged to derive a lower tail Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for L=sumi=1nfracSi2i2, where Sn:ngeq0 is a simple symmetric random walk started at zero. We provide an alternate proof of the LDP via coupling to Brownian motion, and subsequent derivation of the LDP for a continuous time analogue of L. Finally, we turn our attention back to the urn process conditioned to be balanced, and provide a functional limit law describing the trajectory of the urn process.











This page was built for publication: Preferential attachment when stable

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q5203976)