Random walks with preferential relocations to places visited in the past and their application to biology

Abstract

Strongly non-Markovian random walks offer a promising modeling framework for understanding animal and human mobility, yet, few analytical results are available for these processes. Here we solve exactly a model with long range memory where a random walker intermittently revisits previously visited sites according to a reinforced rule. The emergence of frequently visited locations generates very slow diffusion, logarithmic in time, whereas the walker probability density tends to a Gaussian. This scaling form does not emerge from the Central Limit Theorem but from an unusual balance between random and long-range memory steps. In single trajectories, occupation patterns are heterogeneous and have a scale-free structure. The model exhibits good agreement with data of free-ranging capuchin monkeys.