Restrictions of some reinforced processes to subgraphs

Abstract

We prove that the restriction of the vertex-reinforced jump process to a subset of the vertex set is a mixture of vertex-reinforced jump processes. A similar statement holds for the non-linear hyperbolic supersymmetric sigma model. This is then applied to vertex-reinforced jump processes on subdivided versions of graphs of bounded degree, where every edge is replaced by a finite sequence of edges. We prove that discrete-time processes associated to suitable corresponding restrictions are mixtures of positive recurrent Markov chains. We also deduce a similar statement for edge-reinforced random walks.