Cutoff for generalised Bernoulli-Laplace urn models

Abstract

We introduce a multi-colour multi-urn generalisation of the Bernoulli-Laplace urn model, consisting of $d$ urns, $m$ colours, and $dmn$ balls, with $dn$ balls of each colour and $mn$ balls in each urn. At each step, one ball is drawn uniformly at random from each urn, and the chosen balls are redistributed among the urns based on a permutation drawn from a distribution $μ$ on the symmetric group $S_d$. We study the mixing time of this Markov chain for fixed $m$, $d$, and $μ$, as $n \rightarrow \infty$. We show that there is cutoff whenever the chain on $[d]$ corresponding to the evolution of a single ball is irreducible, and that the same holds for a labeled version of the model. As an application, we also obtain partial results on cutoff for a card shuffling version of the model in which the cards are labeled and their ordering within each stack matters.