Tuesday, August 12, 2014

We return to the discussion on Ballot theorem.  We said that if the urn contains a azure balls and b = n - a black balls then if we are given that there is sampling without replacement,  then the probability that azure balls come out ahead is (a-b)/n as long as a >= b. We prove this by drawing similarity to the random walk and translating it to a question about random numbers. The drawing of the azure ball can be considered positive and the drawing of the black ball can be considered negative.The sampling is precisely the event that the S0, S1, S2, ..., Sn are each positive (where Sn is the state of the walk at time n) And the random walk remains positive y. This we know from our equations for random walk to be y/n.
Next we consider asymmetric simple random walk with values in Z but which is not necessarily symmetric.   The probability for a positive sign is taken as p and that for a negative sign is taken as 1-p, the displacements belong to Z.
Probability for the distribution with n steps and the initial state S0 to remain positive k is given by
n Choose (n+k) / 2    p ^ (n+k)/2  q ^ (n-k) /2
Here we are simply counting the paths. The numerator n Choose (n+k)/2  is the number of paths from (0,0) to (n,k) And the total number of paths is given by the inverse of the subsequent terms which are for positive and negative walk.
The initial state S0 is independent of the increments that lead to Sn.
We can now look at the hitting time -
We will now look at the probabilistic and analytical methods to compute the distribution of the hitting time The hitting time can be expressed as a infinite series of iterations n  where n >= 0 for the final state Sn to arrive at x in Z and it takes values 0,1, 2 .. infinity
For a given x, y in displacement space Z, we know that the probability for the hitting time to arrive at y starting from x to be equal to t is the same probability for the hitting time to arrive at y-x from start to be equal to t. In other words, the space is homogenous and the relative transitions between any two points if similar, will result in similar hitting times. We use this to our advantage by considering all such random walks to start from zero without losing any generality.

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