New Special Issue "New Trends in Random Walks"

Dear Colleagues,

Random Walks are among the most recurrent stochastic processes, which appear in problems that come from many branches of science, not just physics. When present, Random Walks play different roles ranging from the modeling of the evolution financial asset prices and valuating their derivatives to the design of new search strategies in biological, technological or social contexts.

A key factor in understanding their success is the ability of Random Walks to extract valuable information from complex environments in a relatively simple way: through the erratic navigation of the graph representing the system by selecting from the nearest neighboring sites, with probabilities chosen uniformly. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing number of new revisions of this topic where the process behaves in a heterogeneous way, and these one-step probabilities may vary in space and time. The origin and nature of this lack of homogeneity is also diverse: Sometimes, it can be connected with the global properties of the graph, such as in the maximal entropy random walk, with the existence of an embedded metric space or with the presence of mechanism of aging, just to name a few. 

The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the latest developments in Random Walks with a heterogeneous behavior. We encourage those researchers working in this kind of processes to send papers with novel contributions with a special emphasis on the interdisciplinary applications that may attract the interests of a wider audience. Although the above examples come from the scope of classical systems, quantum models are also welcome.

Dr. Miquel Montero

Guest Editor

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/random_walks