Periodic Pólya Urns and an Application to Young Tableaux

Abstract

P{o}lya urns are urns where at each unit of time a ball is drawn and is replaced with some other balls according to its colour. We introduce a more general model: The replacement rule depends on the colour of the drawn ball and the value of the time (mod p). We discuss some intriguing properties of the differential operators associated to the generating functions encoding the evolution of these urns. The initial partial differential equation indeed leads to ordinary linear differential equations and we prove that the moment generating functions are D-finite. For a subclass, we exhibit a closed form for the corresponding generating functions (giving the exact state of the urns at time n). When the time goes to infinity, we show that these periodic P{o}lya urns follow a rich variety of behaviours: their asymptotic fluctuations are described by a family of distributions, the generalized Gamma distributions, which can also be seen as powers of Gamma distributions. En passant, we establish some enumerative links with other combinatorial objects, and we give an application for a new result on the asymptotics of Young tableaux: This approach allows us to prove that the law of the lower right corner in a triangular Young tableau follows asymptotically a product of generalized Gamma distributions.