Two Applications of Urn Processes The Fringe Analysis of Search Trees and The Simulation of Quasi-Stationary Distributions of Markov Chains

Abstract

From an urn containing colored balls, one ball is drawn and replaced by a random number of differently colored balls, with the distribution of the added balls depending only on the color of the ball drawn. Under mild regularity conditions, the proportions of different colors will converge to deterministic limits. Two applications of this standard result are described.