We propose a generalized Cramér–Lundberg model of the risk theory of non-life insurance and study its ruin probability. Our model is an extension of that of Dubey (1977) to the case of multiple insureds, where the counting process is a mixed Poisson process and the continuously varying premium rate is determined by a Bayesian rule on the number of claims. We use two proofs to show that, for each fixed value of the safety loading, the ruin probability is the same as that of the classical Cramér–Lundberg model and does not depend on either the distribution of the mixing variable of the driving mixed Poisson process or the number of claim contracts.

We analyse an additive-increase and multiplicative-decrease (also known as growth–collapse) process that grows linearly in time and that, at Poisson epochs, experiences downward jumps that are (deterministically) proportional to its present position. For this process, and also for its reflected versions, we consider one- and two-sided exit problems that concern the identification of the laws of exit times from fixed intervals and half-lines. All proofs are based on a unified first-step analysis approach at the first jump epoch, which allows us to give explicit, yet involved, formulas for their Laplace transforms. All eight Laplace transforms can be described in terms of two so-called scale functions associated with the upward one-sided exit time and with the upward two-sided exit time. All other Laplace transforms can be obtained from the above scale functions by taking limits, derivatives, integrals, and combinations of these.

We investigate expansions for connectedness functions in the random connection model of continuum percolation in powers of the intensity. Precisely, we study the pair-connectedness and the direct-connectedness functions, related to each other via the Ornstein–Zernike equation. We exhibit the fact that the coefficients of the expansions consist of sums over connected and 2-connected graphs. In the physics literature, this is known to be the case more generally for percolation models based on Gibbs point processes and stands in analogy to the formalism developed for correlation functions in liquid-state statistical mechanics.

We find a representation of the direct-connectedness function and bounds on the intensity which allow us to pass to the thermodynamic limit. In some cases (e.g., in high dimensions), the results are valid in almost the entire subcritical regime. Moreover, we relate these expansions to the physics literature and we show how they coincide with the expression provided by the lace expansion.

This paper investigates spatial data on the unit sphere. Traditionally, isotropic Gaussian random fields are considered as the underlying mathematical model of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. We discuss the generalized multifractional Brownian motion and its pointwise Hölder exponent on the sphere. The multifractional approach is used to investigate the CMB data from the Planck mission. These data consist of CMB radiation measurements at narrow angles of the sky sphere. The results obtained suggest that the estimated Hölder exponents for different CMB regions do change from location to location. Therefore, the CMB temperature intensities are multifractional. The methodology developed is used to suggest two approaches for detecting regions with anomalies in the cleaned CMB maps.

The Dagum family of isotropic covariance functions has two parameters that allow for decoupling of the fractal dimension and the Hurst effect for Gaussian random fields that are stationary and isotropic over Euclidean spaces. Sufficient conditions that allow for positive definiteness in $\mathbb{R}^d$ of the Dagum family have been proposed on the basis of the fact that the Dagum family allows for complete monotonicity under some parameter restrictions. The spectral properties of the Dagum family have been inspected to a very limited extent only, and this paper gives insight into this direction. Specifically, we study finite and asymptotic properties of the isotropic spectral density (intended as the Hankel transform) of the Dagum model. Also, we establish some closed-form expressions for the Dagum spectral density in terms of the Fox–Wright functions. Finally, we provide asymptotic properties for such a class of spectral densities.

In contrast to previous belief, we provide examples of stationary ergodic random measures that are both hyperfluctuating and strongly rigid. Therefore we study hyperplane intersection processes (HIPs) that are formed by the vertices of Poisson hyperplane tessellations. These HIPs are known to be hyperfluctuating, that is, the variance of the number of points in a bounded observation window grows faster than the size of the window. Here we show that the HIPs exhibit a particularly strong rigidity property. For any bounded Borel set B, an exponentially small (bounded) stopping set suffices to reconstruct the position of all points in B and, in fact, all hyperplanes intersecting B. Therefore the random measures supported by the hyperplane intersections of arbitrary (but fixed) dimension, are also hyperfluctuating. Our examples aid the search for relations between correlations, density fluctuations, and rigidity properties.

Let $q\ge2$ be an integer, $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 1}$ a stochastic process with state space $\{0,\ldots,q-1\}$ , and F the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of $\sum_{n=1}^\infty X_n q^{-n}$ . We show that stationarity of $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 1}$ is equivalent to a functional equation obeyed by F, and use this to characterize the characteristic function of X and the structure of F in terms of its Lebesgue decomposition. More precisely, while the absolutely continuous component of F can only be the uniform distribution on the unit interval, its discrete component can only be a countable convex combination of certain explicitly computable CDFs for probability distributions with finite support. We also show that $\mathrm{d} F$ is a Rajchman measure if and only if F is the uniform CDF on [0, 1].

In this paper we introduce two new classes of stationary random simplicial tessellations, the so-called $\beta$ - and $\beta^{\prime}$ -Delaunay tessellations. Their construction is based on a space–time paraboloid hull process and generalizes that of the classical Poisson–Delaunay tessellation. We explicitly identify the distribution of volume-power-weighted typical cells, establishing thereby a remarkable connection to the classes of $\beta$ - and $\beta^{\prime}$ -polytopes. These representations are used to determine the principal characteristics of such cells, including volume moments, expected angle sums, and cell intensities.

We study an example of a hit-and-run random walk on the symmetric group $\mathbf S_n$ . Our starting point is the well-understood top-to-random shuffle. In the hit-and-run version, at each single step, after picking the point of insertion j uniformly at random in $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ , the top card is inserted in the jth position k times in a row, where k is uniform in $\{0,1,\ldots,j-1\}$ . The question is, does this accelerate mixing significantly or not? We show that, in $L^2$ and sup-norm, this accelerates mixing at most by a constant factor (independent of n). Analyzing this problem in total variation is an interesting open question. We show that, in general, hit-and-run random walks on finite groups have non-negative spectrum.

$U{\hbox{-}}\textrm{max}$ statistics were introduced by Lao and Mayer in 2008. Such statistics are natural in stochastic geometry. Examples are the maximal perimeters and areas of polygons and polyhedra formed by random points on a circle, ellipse, etc. The main method to study limit theorems for $U{\hbox{-}}\textrm{max}$ statistics is via a Poisson approximation. In this paper we consider a general class of kernels defined on a circle, and we prove a universal limit theorem with the Weibull distribution as a limit. Its parameters depend on the degree of the kernel, the structure of its points of maximum, and the Hessians of the kernel at these points. Almost all limit theorems known so far may be obtained as simple special cases of our general theorem. We also consider several new examples. Moreover, we consider not only the uniform distribution of points but also almost arbitrary distribution on a circle satisfying mild additional conditions.

In this paper, we consider an extended class of univariate and multivariate generalized Pólya processes and study its properties. In the generalized Pólya process considered in [8], each occurrence of an event increases the stochastic intensity of the counting process. In the extended class studied in this paper, on the contrary, it decreases the stochastic intensity of the process, which induces a kind of negative dependence in the increments in the disjoint time intervals. First, we define the extended class of generalized Pólya processes and derive some preliminary results which will be used in the remaining part of the paper. It is seen that the extended class of generalized Pólya processes can be viewed as generalized pure death processes, where the death rate depends on both the state and the time. Based on the preliminary results, the main properties of the multivariate extended generalized Pólya process and meaningful characterizations are obtained. Finally, possible applications to reliability modeling are briefly discussed.

Let $X_1,X_2, \ldots, X_n$ be a sequence of independent random points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with common Lebesgue density f. Under some conditions on f, we obtain a Poisson limit theorem, as $n \to \infty$ , for the number of large probability kth-nearest neighbor balls of $X_1,\ldots, X_n$ . Our result generalizes Theorem 2.2 of [11], which refers to the special case $k=1$ . Our proof is completely different since it employs the Chen–Stein method instead of the method of moments. Moreover, we obtain a rate of convergence for the Poisson approximation.

A second-order random walk on a graph or network is a random walk where transition probabilities depend not only on the present node but also on the previous one. A notable example is the non-backtracking random walk, where the walker is not allowed to revisit a node in one step. Second-order random walks can model physical diffusion phenomena in a more realistic way than traditional random walks and have been very successfully used in various network mining and machine learning settings. However, numerous questions are still open for this type of stochastic processes. In this work, we extend well-known results concerning mean hitting and return times of standard random walks to the second-order case. In particular, we provide simple formulas that allow us to compute these numbers by solving suitable systems of linear equations. Moreover, by introducing the ‘pullback’ first-order stochastic process of a second-order random walk, we provide second-order versions of the renowned Kac’s and Random Target Lemmas.

We derive closed-form solutions to some discounted optimal stopping problems related to the perpetual American cancellable dividend-paying put and call option pricing problems in an extension of the Black–Merton–Scholes model. The cancellation times are assumed to occur when the underlying risky asset price process hits some unobservable random thresholds. The optimal stopping times are shown to be the first times at which the asset price reaches stochastic boundaries depending on the current values of its running maximum and minimum processes. The proof is based on the reduction of the original optimal stopping problems to the associated free-boundary problems and the solution of the latter problems by means of the smooth-fit and modified normal-reflection conditions. We show that the optimal stopping boundaries are characterised as the maximal and minimal solutions of certain first-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations.

We propose non-asymptotic controls of the cumulative distribution function $\mathbb{P}(|X_{t}|\ge \varepsilon)$ , for any $t>0$ , $\varepsilon>0$ and any Lévy process X such that its Lévy density is bounded from above by the density of an $\alpha$ -stable-type Lévy process in a neighborhood of the origin.

Empirical studies (e.g. Jiang et al. (2015) and Mislove et al. (2007)) show that online social networks have not only in- and out-degree distributions with Pareto-like tails, but also a high proportion of reciprocal edges. A classical directed preferential attachment (PA) model generates in- and out-degree distributions with power-law tails, but the theoretical properties of the reciprocity feature in this model have not yet been studied. We derive asymptotic results on the number of reciprocal edges between two fixed nodes, as well as the proportion of reciprocal edges in the entire PA network. We see that with certain choices of parameters, the proportion of reciprocal edges in a directed PA network is close to 0, which differs from the empirical observation. This points out one potential problem of fitting a classical PA model to a given network dataset with high reciprocity, and indicates that alternative models need to be considered.

We apply general moment identities for Poisson stochastic integrals with random integrands to the computation of the moments of Markovian growth–collapse processes. This extends existing formulas for mean and variance available in the literature to closed-form moment expressions of all orders. In comparison with other methods based on differential equations, our approach yields explicit summations in terms of the time parameter. We also treat the case of the associated embedded chain, and provide recursive codes in Maple and Mathematica for the computation of moments and cumulants of any order with arbitrary cut-off moment sequences and jump size functions.

We prove that many, but not all, injective factors arise as crossed products by nonsingular Bernoulli actions of the group $\mathbb {Z}$. We obtain this result by proving a completely general result on the ergodicity, type and Krieger’s associated flow for Bernoulli shifts with arbitrary base spaces. We prove that the associated flow must satisfy a structural property of infinite divisibility. Conversely, we prove that all almost periodic flows, as well as many other ergodic flows, do arise as associated flow of a weakly mixing Bernoulli action of any infinite amenable group. As a byproduct, we prove that all injective factors with almost periodic flow of weights are infinite tensor products of $2 \times 2$ matrices. Finally, we construct Poisson suspension actions with prescribed associated flow for any locally compact second countable group that does not have property (T).

We consider two-dimensional Lévy processes reflected to stay in the positive quadrant. Our focus is on the non-standard regime when the mean of the free process is negative but the reflection vectors point away from the origin, so that the reflected process escapes to infinity along one of the axes. Under rather general conditions, it is shown that such behaviour is certain and each component can dominate the other with positive probability for any given starting position. Additionally, we establish the corresponding invariance principle providing justification for the use of the reflected Brownian motion as an approximate model. Focusing on the probability that the first component dominates, we derive a kernel equation for the respective Laplace transform in the starting position. This is done for the compound Poisson model with negative exponential jumps and, by means of approximation, for the Brownian model. Both equations are solved via boundary value problem analysis, which also yields the domination probability when starting at the origin. Finally, certain asymptotic analysis and numerical results are presented.