We study a renewal theory approach to perpetual two-state switching problems with infinite value functions. Since the corresponding value functions are infinite, the problems fall outside the standard class of problems which can be analyzed using dynamic programming. Instead, we propose an alternative formulation of optimal switching theory in which optimality of a strategy is defined in terms of its long-term mean return, which can be determined using renewal theory. The approach is illustrated by examples in connection with trend-following strategies in finance.

We extend previous large deviations results for the randomised Heston model to the case of moderate deviations. The proofs involve the Gärtner–Ellis theorem and sharp large deviations tools.

Let $(A_i)_{i \geq 0}$ be a finite-state irreducible aperiodic Markov chain and f a lattice score function such that the average score is negative and positive scores are possible. Define $S_0\coloneqq 0$ and $S_k\coloneqq \sum_{i=1}^k f(A_i)$ the successive partial sums, $S^+$ the maximal non-negative partial sum, $Q_1$ the maximal segmental score of the first excursion above 0, and $M_n\coloneqq \max_{0\leq k\leq\ell\leq n} (S_{\ell}-S_k)$ the local score, first defined by Karlin and Altschul (1990). We establish recursive formulae for the exact distribution of $S^+$ and derive a new approximation for the tail behaviour of $Q_1$ , together with an asymptotic equivalence for the distribution of $M_n$ . Computational methods are explicitly presented in a simple application case. The new approximations are compared with those proposed by Karlin and Dembo (1992) in order to evaluate improvements, both in the simple application case and on the real data examples considered by Karlin and Altschul (1990).

This article studies the expected occupancy probabilities on an alphabet. Unlike the standard situation, where observations are assumed to be independent and identically distributed, we assume that they follow a regime-switching Markov chain. For this model, we (1) give finite sample bounds on the expected occupancy probabilities, and (2) provide detailed asymptotics in the case where the underlying distribution is regularly varying. We find that in the regularly varying case the finite sample bounds are rate optimal and have, up to a constant, the same rate of decay as the asymptotic result.

For a zero-mean, unit-variance stationary univariate Gaussian process we derive the probability that a record at the time n, say $X_n$ , takes place, and derive its distribution function. We study the joint distribution of the arrival time process of records and the distribution of the increments between records. We compute the expected number of records. We also consider two consecutive and non-consecutive records, one at time j and one at time n, and we derive the probability that the joint records $(X_j,X_n)$ occur, as well as their distribution function. The probability that the records $X_n$ and $(X_j,X_n)$ take place and the arrival time of the nth record are independent of the marginal distribution function, provided that it is continuous. These results actually hold for a strictly stationary process with Gaussian copulas.

The stacked contact process is a three-state spin system that describes the co-evolution of a population of hosts together with their symbionts. In a nutshell, the hosts evolve according to a contact process while the symbionts evolve according to a contact process on the dynamic subset of the lattice occupied by the host population, indicating that the symbiont can only live within a host. This paper is concerned with a generalization of this system in which the symbionts may affect the fitness of the hosts by either decreasing (pathogen) or increasing (mutualist) their birth rate. Standard coupling arguments are first used to compare the process with other interacting particle systems and deduce the long-term behavior of the host–symbiont system in several parameter regions. The spatial model is also compared with its mean-field approximation as studied in detail by Foxall (2019). Our main result focuses on the case where unassociated hosts have a supercritical birth rate whereas hosts associated to a pathogen have a subcritical birth rate. In this case, the mean-field model predicts coexistence of the hosts and their pathogens provided the infection rate is large enough. For the spatial model, however, only the hosts survive on the one-dimensional integer lattice.

The directed preferential attachment model is revisited. A new exact characterization of the limiting in- and out-degree distribution is given by two independent pure birth processes that are observed at a common exponentially distributed time T (thus creating dependence between in- and out-degree). The characterization gives an explicit form for the joint degree distribution, and this confirms previously derived tail probabilities for the two marginal degree distributions. The new characterization is also used to obtain an explicit expression for tail probabilities in which both degrees are large. A new generalized directed preferential attachment model is then defined and analyzed using similar methods. The two extensions, motivated by empirical evidence, are to allow double-directed (i.e. undirected) edges in the network, and to allow the probability of connecting an ingoing (outgoing) edge to a specified node to also depend on the out-degree (in-degree) of that node.

A new approach to the problem of finding the distribution of integral functionals under the excursion measure is presented. It is based on the technique of excursion straddling a time, stochastic analysis, and calculus on local time, and it is done for Brownian motion with drift reflecting at 0, and under some additional assumptions for some class of Itó diffusions. The new method is an alternative to the classical potential-theoretic approach and gives new specific formulas for distributions under the excursion measure.

We consider coherent systems with independent and identically distributed components. While it is clear that the system’s life will be stochastically larger when the components are replaced with stochastically better components, we show that, in general, similar results may not hold for hazard rate, reverse hazard rate, and likelihood ratio orderings. We find sufficient conditions on the signature vector for these results to hold. These results are combined with other well-known results in the literature to get more general results for comparing two systems of the same size with different signature vectors and possibly with different independent and identically distributed component lifetimes. Some numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the theoretical results.

Let $X_1, X_2,\dots$ be a short-memory linear process of random variables. For $1\leq q<2$ , let ${\mathcal{F}}$ be a bounded set of real-valued functions on [0, 1] with finite q-variation. It is proved that $\{n^{-1/2}\sum_{i=1}^nX_i\,f(i/n)\colon f\in{\mathcal{F}}\}$ converges in outer distribution in the Banach space of bounded functions on ${\mathcal{F}}$ as $n\to\infty$ . Several applications to a regression model and a multiple change point model are given.

Branching processes $(Z_n)_{n \ge 0}$ in a varying environment generalize the Galton–Watson process, in that they allow time dependence of the offspring distribution. Our main results concern general criteria for almost sure extinction, square integrability of the martingale $(Z_n/\mathrm E[Z_n])_{n \ge 0}$, properties of the martingale limit W and a Yaglom-type result stating convergence to an exponential limit distribution of the suitably normalized population size $Z_n$, conditioned on the event $Z_n \gt 0$. The theorems generalize/unify diverse results from the literature and lead to a classification of the processes.

We explore the first passage problem for sticky reflecting diffusion processes with double exponential jumps. The joint Laplace transform of the first passage time to an upper level and the corresponding overshoot is studied. In particular, explicit solutions are presented when the diffusion part is driven by a drifted Brownian motion and by an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process.

A critical branching process with immigration which evolves in a random environment is considered. Assuming that immigration is not allowed when there are no individuals in the population, we investigate the tail distribution of the so-called life period of the process, i.e. the length of the time interval between the moment when the process is initiated by a positive number of particles and the moment when there are no individuals in the population for the first time.

By a random process with immigration at random times we mean a shot noise process with a random response function (response process) in which shots occur at arbitrary random times. Such random processes generalize random processes with immigration at the epochs of a renewal process which were introduced in Iksanov et al. (2017) and bear a strong resemblance to a random characteristic in general branching processes and the counting process in a fixed generation of a branching random walk generated by a general point process. We provide sufficient conditions which ensure weak convergence of finite-dimensional distributions of these processes to certain Gaussian processes. Our main result is specialised to several particular instances of random times and response processes.

We investigate the long-time behavior of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process driven by Lévy noise with regime switching. We provide explicit criteria on the transience and recurrence of this process. Contrasted with the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process driven simply by Brownian motion, whose stationary distribution must be light-tailed, both the jumps caused by the Lévy noise and the regime switching described by a Markov chain can derive the heavy-tailed property of the stationary distribution. The different role played by the Lévy measure and the regime-switching process is clearly characterized.

By a general shot noise process we mean a shot noise process in which the counting process of shots is arbitrary locally finite. Assuming that the counting process of shots satisfies a functional limit theorem in the Skorokhod space with a locally Hölder continuous Gaussian limit process, and that the response function is regularly varying at infinity, we prove that the corresponding general shot noise process satisfies a similar functional limit theorem with a different limit process and different normalization and centering functions. For instance, if the limit process for the counting process of shots is a Brownian motion, then the limit process for the general shot noise process is a Riemann–Liouville process. We specialize our result for five particular counting processes. Also, we investigate Hölder continuity of the limit processes for general shot noise processes.

We establish an invariance principle and a large deviation principle for a biased random walk ${\text{RW}}_\lambda$ with $\lambda\in [0,1)$ on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ . The scaling limit in the invariance principle is not a d-dimensional Brownian motion. For the large deviation principle, its rate function is different from that of a drifted random walk, as may be expected, though the reflected biased random walk evolves like the drifted random walk in the interior of the first quadrant and almost surely visits coordinate planes finitely many times.

It is well known and readily seen that the maximum of n independent and uniformly on [0, 1] distributed random variables, suitably standardised, converges in total variation distance, as n increases, to the standard negative exponential distribution. We extend this result to higher dimensions by considering copulas. We show that the strong convergence result holds for copulas that are in a differential neighbourhood of a multivariate generalised Pareto copula. Sklar’s theorem then implies convergence in variational distance of the maximum of n independent and identically distributed random vectors with arbitrary common distribution function and (under conditions on the marginals) of its appropriately normalised version. We illustrate how these convergence results can be exploited to establish the almost-sure consistency of some estimation procedures for max-stable models, using sample maxima.

We introduce a model for the spreading of fake news in a community of size n. There are $j_n = \alpha n - g_n$ active gullible persons who are willing to believe and spread the fake news, the rest do not react to it. We address the question ‘How long does it take for $r = \rho n - h_n$ persons to become spreaders?’ (The perturbation functions $g_n$ and $h_n$ are o(n), and $0\le \rho \le \alpha\le 1$ .) The setup has a straightforward representation as a convolution of geometric random variables with quadratic probabilities. However, asymptotic distributions require delicate analysis that gives a somewhat surprising outcome. Normalized appropriately, the waiting time has three main phases: (a) away from the depletion of active gullible persons, when $0< \rho < \alpha$ , the normalized variable converges in distribution to a Gumbel random variable; (b) near depletion, when $0< \rho = \alpha$ , with $h_n - g_n \to \infty$ , the normalized variable also converges in distribution to a Gumbel random variable, but the centering function gains weight with increasing perturbations; (c) at almost complete depletion, when $r = j -c$ , for integer $c\ge 0$ , the normalized variable converges in distribution to a convolution of two independent generalized Gumbel random variables. The influence of various perturbation functions endows the three main phases with an infinite number of phase transitions at the seam lines.

A famous result in renewal theory is the central limit theorem for renewal processes. Since, in applications, usually only observations from a finite time interval are available, a bound on the Kolmogorov distance to the normal distribution is desirable. We provide an explicit non-uniform bound for the renewal central limit theorem based on Stein’s method and track the explicit values of the constants. For this bound the inter-arrival time distribution is required to have only a second moment. As an intermediate result of independent interest we obtain explicit bounds in a non-central Berry–Esseen theorem under second moment conditions.