We show that the Potts model on a graph can be approximated by a sequence of independent and identically distributed spins in terms of Wasserstein distance at high temperatures. We prove a similar result for the Curie–Weiss–Potts model on the complete graph, conditioned on being close enough to any of its equilibrium macrostates, in the low-temperature regime. Our proof technique is based on Stein’s method for comparing the stationary distributions of two Glauber dynamics with similar updates, one of which is rapid mixing and contracting on a subset of the state space. Along the way, we prove a new upper bound on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics for the conditional measure of the Curie–Weiss–Potts model near an equilibrium macrostate.

We prove that on any transitive graph G with infinitely many ends, a self-avoiding walk of length n is ballistic with extremely high probability, in the sense that there exist constants $c,t>0$ such that $\mathbb {P}_n(d_G(w_0,w_n)\geq cn)\geq 1-e^{-tn}$ for every $n\geq 1$. Furthermore, we show that the number of self-avoiding walks of length n grows asymptotically like $\mu _w^n$, in the sense that there exists $C>0$ such that $\mu _w^n\leq c_n\leq C\mu _w^n$ for every $n\geq 1$. These results generalise earlier work by Li (J. Comb. Theory Ser. A, 2020). The key to this greater generality is that in contrast to Li’s approach, our proof does not require the existence of a special structure that enables the construction of separating patterns. Our results also extend more generally to quasi-transitive graphs with infinitely many ends, satisfying the additional technical property that there is a quasi-transitive group of automorphisms of G which does not fix an end of G.

We prove two results concerning percolation on general graphs.

• • We establish the converse of the classical Peierls argument: if the critical parameter for (uniform) percolation satisfies $p_c<1$, then the number of minimal cutsets of size n separating a given vertex from infinity is bounded above exponentially in n. This resolves a conjecture of Babson and Benjamini from 1999.

• • We prove that $p_c<1$ for every uniformly transient graph. This solves a problem raised by Duminil-Copin, Goswami, Raoufi, Severo, and Yadin, and provides a new proof that $p_c<1$ for every transitive graph of superlinear growth.

Recently, there has been much progress in understanding stationary measures for colored (also called multi-species or multi-type) interacting particle systems, motivated by asymptotic phenomena and rich underlying algebraic and combinatorial structures (such as nonsymmetric Macdonald polynomials). In this paper, we present a unified approach to constructing stationary measures for most of the known colored particle systems on the ring and the line, including (1) the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (multi-species ASEP, or mASEP); (2) the $q$-deformed Totally Asymmetric Zero Range Process (TAZRP) also known as the $q$-Boson particle system; (3) the $q$-deformed Pushing Totally Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process ($q$-PushTASEP). Our method is based on integrable stochastic vertex models and the Yang–Baxter equation. We express the stationary measures as partition functions of new ‘queue vertex models’ on the cylinder. The stationarity property is a direct consequence of the Yang–Baxter equation. For the mASEP on the ring, a particular case of our vertex model is equivalent to the multiline queues of Martin (Stationary distributions of the multi-type ASEP, Electron. J. Probab. 25 (2020), 1–41). For the colored $q$-Boson process and the $q$-PushTASEP on the ring, we recover and generalize known stationary measures constructed using multiline queues or other methods by Ayyer, Mandelshtam and Martin (Modified Macdonald polynomials and the multispecies zero range process: II, Algebr. Comb. 6 (2022), 243–284; Modified Macdonald polynomials and the multispecies zero-range process: I, Algebr. Comb. 6 (2023), 243–284) and Bukh and Cox (Periodic words, common subsequences and frogs, Ann. Appl. Probab. 32 (2022), 1295–1332). Our proofs of stationarity use the Yang–Baxter equation and bypass the Matrix Product Ansatz (used for the mASEP by Prolhac, Evans and Mallick (The matrix product solution of the multispecies partially asymmetric exclusion process, J. Phys. A. 42 (2009), 165004)). On the line and in a quadrant, we use the Yang–Baxter equation to establish a general colored Burke’s theorem, which implies that suitable specializations of our queue vertex models produce stationary measures for particle systems on the line. We also compute the colored particle currents in stationarity.

In this paper, we prove that the hitting probability of the Minkowski sum of fractal percolations can be characterised by capacity. Then we extend this result to Minkowski sums of general random sets in $\mathbb Z^d$, including ranges of random walks and critical branching random walks, whose hitting probabilities are described by Newtonian capacity individually.

We prove a Poisson process approximation result for stabilising functionals of a determinantal point process. Our results use concrete couplings of determinantal processes with different Palm measures and exploit their association properties. Second, we focus on the Ginibre process and show in the asymptotic scenario of an increasing observation window that the process of points with a large nearest neighbour distance converges after a suitable scaling to a Poisson point process. As a corollary, we obtain the scaling of the maximum nearest neighbour distance in the Ginibre process, which turns out to be different from its analogue for independent points.

We analyze generating functions for trees and for connected subgraphs on the complete graph, and identify a single scaling profile which applies for both generating functions in a critical window. Our motivation comes from the analysis of the finite-size scaling of lattice trees and lattice animals on a high-dimensional discrete torus, for which we conjecture that the identical profile applies in dimensions $d \ge 8$.

We define a random graph obtained by connecting each point of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ independently and uniformly to a fixed number $1 \leq k \leq 2d$ of its nearest neighbors via a directed edge. We call this graph the directed k-neighbor graph. Two natural associated undirected graphs are the undirected and the bidirectional k-neighbor graph, where we connect two vertices by an undirected edge whenever there is a directed edge in the directed k-neighbor graph between the vertices in at least one, respectively precisely two, directions. For these graphs we study the question of percolation, i.e. the existence of an infinite self-avoiding path. Using different kinds of proof techniques for different classes of cases, we show that for $k=1$ even the undirected k-neighbor graph never percolates, while the directed k-neighbor graph percolates whenever $k \geq d+1$, $k \geq 3$, and $d \geq 5$, or $k \geq 4$ and $d=4$. We also show that the undirected 2-neighbor graph percolates for $d=2$, the undirected 3-neighbor graph percolates for $d=3$, and we provide some positive and negative percolation results regarding the bidirectional graph as well. A heuristic argument for high dimensions indicates that this class of models is a natural discrete analogue of the k-nearest-neighbor graphs studied in continuum percolation, and our results support this interpretation.

We consider a single server queue that has a threshold to change its arrival process and service speed by its queue length, which is referred to as a two-level GI/G/1 queue. This model is motivated by an energy saving problem for a single server queue whose arrival process and service speed are controlled. To obtain its performance in tractable form, we study the limit of the stationary distribution of the queue length in this two-level queue under scaling in heavy traffic. Except for a special case, this limit corresponds to its diffusion approximation. It is shown that this limiting distribution is truncated exponential (or uniform if the drift is null) below the threshold level and exponential above it under suitably chosen system parameters and generally distributed interarrival times and workloads brought by customers. This result is proved under a mild limitation on arrival parameters using the so-called basic adjoint relationship (BAR) approach studied in Braverman, Dai, and Miyazawa (2017, 2024) and Miyazawa (2017, 2024). We also intuitively discuss about a diffusion process corresponding to the limit of the stationary distribution under scaling.

The Wright–Fisher model, originating in Wright (1931) is one of the canonical probabilistic models used in mathematical population genetics to study how genetic type frequencies evolve in time. In this paper we bound the rate of convergence of the stationary distribution for a finite population Wright–Fisher Markov chain with parent-independent mutation to the Dirichlet distribution. Our result improves the rate of convergence established in Gan et al. (2017) from $\mathrm{O}(1/\sqrt{N})$ to $\mathrm{O}(1/N)$. The results are derived using Stein’s method, in particular, the prelimit generator comparison method.

In their celebrated paper [CLR10], Caputo, Liggett and Richthammer proved Aldous’ conjecture and showed that for an arbitrary finite graph, the spectral gap of the interchange process is equal to the spectral gap of the underlying random walk. A crucial ingredient in the proof was the Octopus Inequality — a certain inequality of operators in the group ring $\mathbb{R}\left[{\mathrm{Sym}}_{n}\right]$ of the symmetric group. Here we generalise the Octopus Inequality and apply it to generalising the Caputo–Liggett–Richthammer Theorem to certain hypergraphs, proving some cases of a conjecture of Caputo.

We focus on obtaining Block–Savits type characterizations for different ageing classes as well as some important renewal classes by using the Laplace transform. We also introduce a novel approach, based on the equilibrium distribution, to handle situations where the techniques of Block and Savits (1980) either fail or involve tedious calculations. Our approach in conjunction with the theory of total positivity yields Vinogradov’s (1973) result for the increasing failure rate class when the distribution function is continuous. We also present simple but elegant proofs for Block and Savits’ results for the decreasing mean residual life, new better than used in expectation, and harmonic new better than used in expectation classes as applications of our approach. We address several other related issues that are germane to our problem. Finally, we conclude with a short discussion on the issue of convolutions.

Conditional risk measures and their associated risk contribution measures are commonly employed in finance and actuarial science for evaluating systemic risk and quantifying the effects of risk interactions. This paper introduces various types of contribution ratio measures based on the multivariate conditional value-at-risk (MCoVaR), multivariate conditional expected shortfall (MCoES), and multivariate marginal mean excess (MMME) studied in [34] (Ortega-Jiménez, P., Sordo, M., & Suárez-Llorens, A. (2021). Stochastic orders and multivariate measures of risk contagion. Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, vol. 96, 199–207) and [11] (Das, B., & Fasen-Hartmann, V. (2018). Risk contagion under regular variation and asymptotic tail independence. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 165(1), 194–215) to assess the relative effects of a single risk when other risks in a group are in distress. The properties of these contribution risk measures are examined, and sufficient conditions for comparing these measures between two sets of random vectors are established using univariate and multivariate stochastic orders and statistically dependent notions. Numerical examples are presented to validate these conditions. Finally, a real dataset from the cryptocurrency market is used to analyze the spillover effects through our proposed contribution measures.

This paper defines and studies a broad class of shock models by assuming that a Markovian arrival process models the arrival pattern of shocks. Under the defined class, we show that the system’s lifetime follows the well-known phase-type distribution. Further, we examine the age replacement policy for systems with a continuous phase-type distribution, identifying sufficient conditions for determining the optimal replacement time. Since phase-type distributions are dense in the class of lifetime distributions, our findings for the age replacement policy are widely applicable. We include numerical examples and graphical illustrations to support our results.

We consider the hard-core model on a finite square grid graph with stochastic Glauber dynamics parametrized by the inverse temperature $\beta$. We investigate how the transition between its two maximum-occupancy configurations takes place in the low-temperature regime $\beta \to \infty$ in the case of periodic boundary conditions. The hard-core constraints and the grid symmetry make the structure of the critical configurations for this transition, also known as essential saddles, very rich and complex. We provide a comprehensive geometrical characterization of these configurations that together constitute a bottleneck for the Glauber dynamics in the low-temperature limit. In particular, we develop a novel isoperimetric inequality for hard-core configurations with a fixed number of particles and show how the essential saddles are characterized not only by the number of particles but also their geometry.

We consider interacting urns on a finite directed network, where both sampling and reinforcement processes depend on the nodes of the network. This extends previous research by incorporating node-dependent sampling and reinforcement. We classify the sampling and reinforcement schemes, as well as the networks on which the proportion of balls of either colour in each urn converges almost surely to a deterministic limit. We also investigate conditions for achieving synchronisation of the colour proportions across the urns and analyse fluctuations under specific conditions on the reinforcement scheme and network structure.

We introduce and study a game-theoretic model to understand the spread of an epidemic in a homogeneous population. A discrete-time stochastic process is considered where, in each epoch, first, a randomly chosen agent updates their action trying to maximize a proposed utility function, and then agents who have viral exposures beyond their immunity get infected. Our main results discuss asymptotic limiting distributions of both the cardinality of the subset of infected agents and the action profile, considered under various values of two parameters (initial action and immunity profile). We also show that the theoretical distributions are almost always achieved in the first few epochs.

The problem of reservation in a large distributed system is analyzed via a new mathematical model. The target application is car-sharing systems. This model is motivated by the large station-based car-sharing system in France called Autolib’. This system can be described as a closed stochastic network where the nodes are the stations and the customers are the cars. The user can reserve a car and a parking space. We study the evolution of the system when the reservation of parking spaces and cars is effective for all users. The asymptotic behavior of the underlying stochastic network is given when the number N of stations and the fleet size M increase at the same rate. The analysis involves a Markov process on a state space with dimension of order $N^2$. It is quite remarkable that the state process describing the evolution of the stations, whose dimension is of order N, converges in distribution, although not Markov, to a non-homogeneous Markov process. We prove this mean-field convergence. We also prove, using combinatorial arguments, that the mean-field limit has a unique equilibrium measure when the time between reserving and picking up the car is sufficiently small. This result extends the case where only the parking space can be reserved.

In this paper, we analyze a polling system on a circle. Random batches of customers arrive at a circle, where each customer, independently, obtains a location that is uniformly distributed on the circle. A single server cyclically traverses the circle to serve all customers. Using mean value analysis, we derive the expected number of waiting customers within a given distance of the server. We exploit this to obtain closed-form expressions for both the mean batch sojourn time and the mean time to delivery.

This paper obtains logarithmic asymptotics of moderate deviations of the stochastic process of the number of customers in a many-server queue with generally distributed inter-arrival and service times under a heavy-traffic scaling akin to the Halfin–Whitt regime. The deviation function is expressed in terms of the solution to a Fredholm equation of the second kind. A key element of the proof is the large-deviation principle in the scaling of moderate deviations for the sequential empirical process. The techniques of large-deviation convergence and idempotent processes are used extensively.