An expansion for self-interacting random walks

Abstract

We derive a perturbation expansion for general self-interacting random walks, where steps are made on the basis of the history of the path. Examples of models where this expansion applies are reinforced random walk, excited random walk, the true (weakly) self-avoiding walk, loop-erased random walk, and annealed random walk in random environment. In this paper we show that the expansion gives rise to useful formulae for the speed and variance of the random walk, when these quantities are known to exist. The results and formulae of this paper have been used elsewhere by the authors to prove monotonicity properties for the speed (in high dimensions) of excited random walk and related models, an..