The large deviation principle in the small noise limit is derived for solutions of possibly degenerate Itô stochastic differential equations with predictable coefficients, which may also depend on the large deviation parameter. The result is established under mild assumptions using the Dupuis-Ellis weak convergence approach. Applications to certain systems with memory and to positive diffusions with square-root-like dispersion coefficient are included.

We analyze the optimal policy for the sequential selection of an alternating subsequence from a sequence of n independent observations from a continuous distribution F, and we prove a central limit theorem for the number of selections made by that policy. The proof exploits the backward recursion of dynamic programming and assembles a detailed understanding of the associated value functions and selection rules.

We consider a broad class of fair leader election algorithms, and study the duration of contestants (the number of rounds a randomly selected contestant stays in the competition) and the overall cost of the algorithm. We give sufficient conditions for the duration to have a geometric limit distribution (a perpetuity built from Bernoulli random variables), and for the limiting distribution of the total cost (after suitable normalization) to be a perpetuity. For the duration, the proof is established via convergence (to 0) of the first-order Wasserstein distance from the geometric limit. For the normalized overall cost, the method of proof is also convergence of the first-order Wasserstein distance, augmented with an argument based on a contraction mapping in the first-order Wasserstein metric space to show that the limit approaches a unique fixed-point solution of a perpetuity distributional equation. The use of these two steps is commonly referred to as the contraction method.

We focus on a particular connection between queueing and risk models in a multidimensional setting. We first consider the joint workload process in a queueing model with parallel queues and simultaneous arrivals at the queues. For the case that the service times are ordered (from largest in the first queue to smallest in the last queue), we obtain the Laplace-Stieltjes transform of the joint stationary workload distribution. Using a multivariate duality argument between queueing and risk models, this also gives the Laplace transform of the survival probability of all books in a multivariate risk model with simultaneous claim arrivals and the same ordering between claim sizes. Other features of the paper include a stochastic decomposition result for the workload vector, and an outline of how the two-dimensional risk model with a general two-dimensional claim size distribution (hence, without ordering of claim sizes) is related to a known Riemann boundary-value problem.

In this article we study the parabolic system of equations which is closely related to a multitype branching Brownian motion. Particular attention is paid to the monotone traveling wave solutions of this system. Provided with some moment conditions, we show the existence, uniqueness, and asymptotic behaviors of such waves with speed greater than or equal to a critical value c̲ and nonexistence of such waves with speed smaller than c̲.

Stochastic geometry models for wireless communication networks have recently attracted much attention. This is because the performance of such networks critically depends on the spatial configuration of wireless nodes and the irregularity of the node configuration in a real network can be captured by a spatial point process. However, most analysis of such stochastic geometry models for wireless networks assumes, owing to its tractability, that the wireless nodes are deployed according to homogeneous Poisson point processes. This means that the wireless nodes are located independently of each other and their spatial correlation is ignored. In this work we propose a stochastic geometry model of cellular networks such that the wireless base stations are deployed according to the Ginibre point process. The Ginibre point process is one of the determinantal point processes and accounts for the repulsion between the base stations. For the proposed model, we derive a computable representation for the coverage probability—the probability that the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for a mobile user achieves a target threshold. To capture its qualitative property, we further investigate the asymptotics of the coverage probability as the SINR threshold becomes large in a special case. We also present the results of some numerical experiments.

A version of the contact process (effectively an SIS model) on a finite set of sites is considered in which there is the possibility of spontaneous infection. A companion process is also considered in which spontaneous infection does not occur from the disease-free state. Monotonicity with respect to parameters and initial data is established, and conditions for irreducibility and exponential convergence of the processes are given. For the spontaneous process, a set of approximating equations is derived, and its properties investigated.

In this paper some important properties of the generalized Pólya process are derived and their applications are discussed. The generalized Pólya process is defined based on the stochastic intensity. By interpreting the defined stochastic intensity of the generalized Pólya process, the restarting property of the process is discussed. Based on the restarting property of the process, the joint distribution of the number of events is derived and the conditional joint distribution of the arrival times is also obtained. In addition, some properties of the compound process defined for the generalized Pólya process are derived. Furthermore, a new type of repair is defined based on the process and its application to the area of reliability is discussed. Several examples illustrating the applications of the obtained properties to various areas are suggested.

Consider two independent Goldstein-Kac telegraph processes X1(t) and X2(t) on the real line ℝ. The processes Xk(t), k = 1, 2, describe stochastic motions at finite constant velocities c1 > 0 and c2 > 0 that start at the initial time instant t = 0 from the origin of ℝ and are controlled by two independent homogeneous Poisson processes of rates λ1 > 0 and λ2 > 0, respectively. We obtain a closed-form expression for the probability distribution function of the Euclidean distance ρ(t) = |X1(t) - X2(t)|, t > 0, between these processes at an arbitrary time instant t > 0. Some numerical results are also presented.

We consider a multivariate continuous-time ARMA (MCARMA) process sampled at a high-frequency time grid {hn, 2hn,…, nhn}, where hn ↓ 0 and nhn → ∞ as n → ∞, or at a constant time grid where hn = h. For this model, we present the asymptotic behavior of the properly normalized partial sum to a multivariate stable or a multivariate normal random vector depending on the domain of attraction of the driving Lévy process. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic behavior of the sample variance. In the case of finite second moments of the driving Lévy process the sample variance is a consistent estimator. Moreover, we embed the MCARMA process in a cointegrated model. For this model, we propose a parameter estimator and derive its asymptotic behavior. The results are given for more general processes than MCARMA processes and contain some asymptotic properties of stochastic integrals.

The generalized Pólya urn has been extensively studied and is widely applied in many disciplines. An important application of urn models is in the development of randomized treatment allocation schemes in clinical studies. The randomly reinforced urn was recently proposed, but, although the model has some intuitively desirable properties, it lacks theoretical justification. In this paper we obtain important asymptotic properties for multicolor reinforced urn models. We derive results for the rate of convergence of the number of patients assigned to each treatment under a set of minimum required conditions and provide the distributions of the limits. Furthermore, we study the asymptotic behavior for the nonhomogeneous case.

We study the endemic behaviour of a homogeneously mixing SIS epidemic in a population of size N with a general infectious period, Q, by introducing a novel subcritical branching process with immigration approximation. This provides a simple but useful approximation of the quasistationary distribution of the SIS epidemic for finite N and the asymptotic Gaussian limit for the endemic equilibrium as N → ∞. A surprising observation is that the quasistationary distribution of the SIS epidemic model depends on Q only through

We study the existence of a unique stationary distribution and ergodicity for a two-dimensional affine process. Its first coordinate process is supposed to be a so-called α-root process with α ∈ (1, 2]. We prove the existence of a unique stationary distribution for the affine process in the α ∈ (1, 2] case; furthermore, we show ergodicity in the α = 2 case.

We study an interacting random walk system on ℤ where at time 0 there is an active particle at 0 and one inactive particle on each site n ≥ 1. Particles become active when hit by another active particle. Once activated, the particle starting at n performs an asymmetric, translation invariant, nearest neighbor random walk with left-jump probability ln. We give conditions for global survival, local survival, and infinite activation both in the case where all particles are immortal and in the case where particles have geometrically distributed lifespan (with parameter depending on the starting location of the particle). More precisely, once activated, the particle at n survives at each step with probability pn ∈ [0, 1]. In particular, in the immortal case, we prove a 0-1 law for the probability of local survival when all particles drift to the right. Besides that, we give sufficient conditions for local survival or local extinction when all particles drift to the left. In the mortal case, we provide sufficient conditions for global survival, local survival, and local extinction (which apply to the immortal case with mixed drifts as well). Analysis of explicit examples is provided: we describe completely the phase diagram in the cases ½ - ln ~ ± 1 / nα, pn = 1 and ½ - ln ~ ± 1 / nα, 1 - pn ~ 1 / nβ (where α, β > 0).

In this paper we develop a collection of results associated to the analysis of the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers algorithm, in the context of high-dimensional independent and identically distributed target probabilities. The SMC samplers algorithm can be designed to sample from a single probability distribution, using Monte Carlo to approximate expectations with respect to this law. Given a target density in d dimensions our results are concerned with d → ∞, while the number of Monte Carlo samples, N, remains fixed. We deduce an explicit bound on the Monte-Carlo error for estimates derived using the SMC sampler and the exact asymptotic relative -error of the estimate of the normalising constant associated to the target. We also establish marginal propagation of chaos properties of the algorithm. These results are deduced when the cost of the algorithm is O(Nd2).