The water level in a reservoir is modelled as a controlled diffusion process on a compact interval of the real line. The problem is to control the water discharge rate so as to minimise the expected costs, which depend upon the histories of the water levels and release rates. The form of the optimal control is studied for two general classes of reservoir control problems.

Given n independent, identically distributed random variables, let ρ n denote the probability that the maximum is unique. This probability is clearly unity if the distribution of the random variables is continuous. We explore the asymptotic behavior of the ρ n's in the case of geometric random variables. We find a function Φsuch that (ρ n – Φ(n)) → 0 as n →∞. In particular, we show that ρ n does not converge as n →∞. We derive a related asymptotic result for the expected value of the maximum of the sample. These results arose out of a random depletion model due to Bajaj, which was the original motivation for this paper and which is included.

This paper discusses the asymptotic behaviour, and in particular the critical singularities, of the generating functions for Pólya walks with a given fraction of visits to a hyperplane when the walk is or is not constrained to be on one side of that hyperplane. The three-dimensional case has applications in physics and chemistry.

In previous papers (1976), (1977a), (1979) limit theorems were obtained for the classical Ising model, and these provided the basis for asymptotic inference. The present paper extends these results to more general Ising models.

In two and more dimensions, likelihood inference for the thermodynamic parameters (i.e. the interaction energies) is effectively impossible. The problem is that the error in locating critical and/or confidence regions is as large as their diameters. To remedy this requires more accurate characterizations of the partition functions, but these seem unlikely to be forthcoming. Besag's coding estimators for these parameters are inverse hyperbolic tangents of the roots of simultaneous polynomial equations and hence avoid such location errors. However, little is yet known about their sampling characteristics. Finally, likelihood inference for lattice averages (an alternative parametrization) is straightforward from the limit theorems.

Data classified into several groups usually depend on structural and accessory parameters, the structural parameter θ being a constant for all the data, while the accessory parameters ϕ i vary between groups.

For the structural parameter, inferences that are free of the accessory parameters can be made when the ϕ i admit sufficient statistics or surrogates Si, by conditioning on the Si or by constructing statistics independent of the Si.

When the Si are functions of the structural parameter θ, θ is said to be endomorphic. Conditional likelihood methods are not unequivocal for endomorphic parameters; instead, inference is based on statistics independent of the Si, and so free of the ϕ i, derived from conditional distribution functions.

With endomorphic parameters, since the surrogates and the statistics independent of them are functions of θ, tests of independence of these sets of statistics provide a means of making inferences about θ.

Let ξ (t); t ≧ 0 be a normalized continuous mean square differentiable stationary normal process with covariance function r(t). Further, let and set . We give bounds which are roughly of order Τ –δ for the rate of convergence of the distribution of the maximum and of the number of upcrossings of a high level by ξ (t) in the interval [0, T]. The results assume that r(t) and r′(t) decay polynomially at infinity and that r″ (t) is suitably bounded. For the number of upcrossings it is in addition assumed that r(t) is non-negative.

The move-to-front scheme is studied taking into account some forms of Markov dependence for the way items are requested. One of the dependences specifically rules out two consecutive requests for the same item. The other is the so-called p-correlation. An expression for the stationary distribution of the sequence of arrangements of items is given in each case. A necessary and sufficient condition for these distributions to belong to a particular class of distributions is also given. The mean search time for an item is calculated for each form of dependence and these are compared with the value obtained in the case of independent requests. Some properties of the sequence of requests are given. Finally, an expression for the variance of the search time is obtained.

We consider one-dimensional processes in which particles annihilate their neighbours, grow until they meet their neighbours or are deposited onto surfaces. All of the models considered have the property that they are connected to exponential series often by an inclusion-exclusion argument.

We consider a network of dams to which the external input is a multivariate Markov additive process. For each state of the Markov chain modulating the Markov additive process, the release rates are linear (constant multiple of the content level). Each unit of material processed by a given station is then divided into fixed proportions each of which is routed to another station or leaves the system. For each state of the modulating process, this routeing is determined by some substochastic matrix. We identify simple conditions for stability and show how to compute transient and stationary characteristics of such networks.

Suppose that pulses arrive according to a Poisson process of rate λ with the duration of each pulse independently chosen from a distribution F having finite mean. Let X(t) be the shot noise process formed by the superposition of these pulses. We consider functionals H(X) of the sample path of X(t). H is said to be L-superadditive if for all functions f and g. For any distribution F for the pulse durations, we define H(F) = EH(X). We prove that if H is L-superadditive and for all convex functions ϕ, then . Various consequences of this result are explored.

In this paper, we analyse the set of all possible aggregate distributions of the sum of standard uniform random variables, a simply stated yet challenging problem in the literature of distributions with given margins. Our main results are obtained for two distinct cases. In the case of dimension two, we obtain four partial characterization results. For dimension greater than or equal to three, we obtain a full characterization of the set of aggregate distributions, which is the first complete characterization result of this type in the literature for any choice of continuous marginal distributions.

We establish a sufficient condition for which the expected area under the trajectory of the carrier process is directly proportional to the expected number of removed carriers in the class of carrier-borne, right-shift, epidemic models studied by Severo (1969a). This result generalizes the previous work of Downton (1972) and Jerwood (1974) for some special cases of these models. We use the result to compute expected costs in the carrier-borne model due to Downton (1968) when it is unlikely that all the susceptibles will be infected. We conclude by showing that for the special case considered by Weiss (1965) this treatment of the expected cost is reasonable for populations with a large initial number of susceptibles.

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.

This paper considers certain stochastic models for token and type counts in literary texts. Elaborating on some models of Gani, it is shown that reasonable fits can be obtained to some data of Yule on Macaulay's Essays.

In this paper we consider the splitting method first introduced in rare event analysis. In this technique, the sample paths are split into R multiple copies at various stages to speed up the simulation. Given the cost, the optimization of the algorithm suggests taking all the transition probabilities to be equal; nevertheless, in practice, these quantities are unknown. We address this problem by presenting an algorithm in two phases.

Logarithmic asymptotics of the mean process {Sn∕n} are investigated in the presence of heavy-tailed increments. As a consequence, a full large deviations principle for means is obtained when the hazard function of an increment is regularly varying with index α∈(0,1). This class includes all stretched exponential distributions. Thus, the previous research of Gantert et al. (2014) is extended. Furthermore, the presented proofs are more transparent than the techniques used by Nagaev (1979). In addition, the novel approach is compatible with other common classes of distributions, e.g. those of lognormal type.

We use a sample-path technique to derive asymptotics of generalized Jackson queueing networks in the fluid scale; that is, when space and time are scaled by the same factor n. The analysis only presupposes the existence of long-run averages and is based on some monotonicity and concavity arguments for the fluid processes. The results provide a functional strong law of large numbers for stochastic Jackson queueing networks, since they apply to their sample paths with probability 1. The fluid processes are shown to be piecewise linear and an explicit formulation of the different drifts is computed. A few applications of this fluid limit are given. In particular, a new computation of the constant that appears in the stability condition for such networks is given. In a certain context of a rare event, the fluid limit of the network is also derived explicitly.

The problem of computing the moment generating function of the first passage time T to a > 0 or −b < 0 for a one-dimensional Wiener process {X(t), t ≥ 0} is generalized by assuming that the infinitesimal parameters of the process may depend on the sign of X(t). The probability that the process is absorbed at a is also computed explicitly, as is the expected value of T.

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is a transport protocol used in the Internet. In Ott (2005), a more general class of candidate transport protocols called ‘protocols in the TCP paradigm’ was introduced. The long-term objective of studying this class is to find protocols with promising performance characteristics. In this paper we study Markov chain models derived from protocols in the TCP paradigm. Protocols in the TCP paradigm, as TCP, protect the network from congestion by decreasing the ‘congestion window’ (i.e. the amount of data allowed to be sent but not yet acknowledged) when there is packet loss or packet marking, and increasing it when there is no loss. When loss of different packets are assumed to be independent events and the probability p of loss is assumed to be constant, the protocol gives rise to a Markov chain {Wn}, where Wn is the size of the congestion window after the transmission of the nth packet. For a wide class of such Markov chains, we prove weak convergence results, after appropriate rescaling of time and space, as p → 0. The limiting processes are defined by stochastic differential equations. Depending on certain parameter values, the stochastic differential equation can define an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process or can be driven by a Poisson process.