C. Banderier ; P. Nicodème - Bounded discrete walks

dmtcs:2792 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, January 1, 2010, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AM, 21st International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'10) - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.2792
Bounded discrete walksArticle

Authors: C. Banderier 1; P. Nicodème 2

  • 1 Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord
  • 2 Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]

This article tackles the enumeration and asymptotics of directed lattice paths (that are isomorphic to unidimensional paths) of bounded height (walks below one wall, or between two walls, for $\textit{any}$ finite set of jumps). Thus, for any lattice paths, we give the generating functions of bridges ("discrete'' Brownian bridges) and reflected bridges ("discrete'' reflected Brownian bridges) of a given height. It is a new success of the "kernel method'' that the generating functions of such walks have some nice expressions as symmetric functions in terms of the roots of the kernel. These formulae also lead to fast algorithms for computing the $n$-th Taylor coefficients of the corresponding generating functions. For a large class of walks, we give the discrete distribution of the height of bridges, and show the convergence to a Rayleigh limit law. For the family of walks consisting of a $-1$ jump and many positive jumps, we give more precise bounds for the speed of convergence. We end our article with a heuristic application to bioinformatics that has a high speed-up relative to previous work.


Volume: DMTCS Proceedings vol. AM, 21st International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'10)
Section: Proceedings
Published on: January 1, 2010
Imported on: January 31, 2017
Keywords: Random walks,analytic combinatorics,Brownian bridge,Rayleigh distribution,genes ranking statistics,[INFO.INFO-DS] Computer Science [cs]/Data Structures and Algorithms [cs.DS],[MATH.MATH-CO] Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO],[INFO.INFO-DM] Computer Science [cs]/Discrete Mathematics [cs.DM],[INFO.INFO-CG] Computer Science [cs]/Computational Geometry [cs.CG]

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