Joint invariance principles for random walks with positively and negatively reinforced steps

Abstract

Given a random walk $(S_n)$ with typical step distributed according to some fixed law and a fixed parameter $p \in (0,1)$, the associated positively step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time process which performs at each step, with probability $1-p$, the same step as $(S_n)$ while with probability $p$, it repeats one of the steps it performed previously chosen uniformly at random. The negatively step-reinforced random walk follows the same dynamics but when a step is repeated its sign is also changed. In this work, we shall prove functional limit theorems for the triplet of a random walk, coupled with its positive and negative reinforced versions when $p<1/2$ and when the typical step is centred. As our work will show, the limiting process is Gaussian and admits a simple representation in terms of stochastic integrals. Our method exhausts a martingale approach in conjunction with the martingale functional CLT.