Random Walk of a Cat in a Building

Abstract

One usually thinks of a cat moving from one room to another in an apartment as random walk model. Imagine now that it also has the possibility to go from one apartment to another by crossing some corridors. That yields a new probabilistic model for which each corridor connects the entrance rooms of several apartments. This article shows that the determinants of the stochastic and the exponential distance matrices of that model have a nice factorization. Two examples involving indirectly acyclic digraphs and hyperplane arrangements are provided.