Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
In the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model, two urns each contain balls, with red and blue balls in total. Independently choose one ball uniformly from each urn and exchange them. The red count in the first urn is a Markov chain on , withThe upward event exchanges a blue ball from the first urn with a red ball from the second; the downward event reverses the colors. HenceStarting from , the mean is , with the initial value understood separately if the geometric factor is zero. For , this mean tends to . For , however, the only two configurations alternate and the expected imbalance does not decay.
The Stationary distribution is the hypergeometric distributionIt counts uniformly allocated red/blue configurations. The ratio verifies Detailed balance with the displayed transitions. The chain is irreducible; for an interior holding Probability also makes it aperiodic, while the chain has period two. This model separates convergence of an average imbalance from the full probability law and its periodicity.
Conditional on , urn 1 has red and blue balls, while urn 2 has red and blue balls. The independent selections therefore giveEvery other conditional probability is zero. The out-of-range terms at or already have zero probability. These are the transition probabilities of the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model.
At state , urn 1 has red and blue balls, while urn 2 has red and blue balls. Conditional on the state, the two choices are independent, each assigning probability to every ball. A red–blue exchange decreases ; a blue–red exchange increases it; equal colours leave it unchanged. Thus the conditional probability mass function isThe three numerators sum to . At or , the outward transition has probability zero. These are the transitions of the Bernoulli-Laplace diffusion model. The displayed formula is a transition kernel on every state; a literal conditional probability at a particular time requires the conditioning event to have positive probability.