A central limit theorem for unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

Abstract

In this paper, we study a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks that unifies the elephant random walk, the positively step-reinforced random walk, and the negatively step-reinforced random walk. By establishing a connection with bond percolation on random recursive trees, these processes can be represented as randomly weighted sums of independent and identically distributed random variables. We first derive normal and stable central limit theorems for such randomly weighted sums, and then apply these results to obtain a unified central limit theorem for unbalanced step-reinforced random walks.