Random nested tetrahedra

Marco Scarsini and Gérard Letac

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Abstract: In a real n-1 dimensional affine space E, consider a tetrahedron T0, i.e. the convex hull of n points α1, α2, ..., αn of E. Choose n independent points β1, β2, ..., βn randomly and uniformly in T0, thus obtaining a new tetrahedron T1 contained in T0. Repeat the operation with T1 instead of T0, obtaining T2, and so on. The sequence of the Tk shrinks to a point Y of T0 and this note computes the distribution of the barycentric coordinates of Y with respect to (α1, α2, ..., αn) (Corollary 2.3). We also obtain the explicit distribution of Y in more general cases. The technique used is to reduce the problem to the study of a random walk on the semigroup of stochastic (n,n) matrices, and this note is a geometrical application of a former result of Chamayou and Letac (1994).

Keywords: Random subdivision; limit distributions; Dirichlet distribution; compositional data; barycentric coordinates; products of random matrices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Advances in Applied Probability, 1998, Vol. 30, N°3, pp. 619-627. ⟨10.1239/aap/1035228119⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00541756

DOI: 10.1239/aap/1035228119

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