The estimation of a star-shaped set S from a random sample of points X1,…,Xn ∊ S is considered. We show that S can be consistently approximated (with respect to both the Hausdorff metric and the ‘distance in measure’ between sets) by an estimator ŝn defined as a union of balls centered at the sample points with a common radius which can be chosen in such a way that ŝn is also star-shaped. We also prove that, under some mild conditions, the topological boundary of the estimator ŝn converges, in the Hausdorff sense, to that of S; this has a particular interest when the proposed estimation problem is considered from the point of view of statistical image analysis.

Let n points be placed uniformly at random in a subset A of the plane. A point is said to be maximal in the configuration if no other point is larger in both coordinates. We show that, for large n and for many sets A, the number of maximal points is approximately normally distributed. The argument uses Stein's method, and is also applicable in higher dimensions.

Seeds are randomly scattered in ℝd according to an m-dependent point process. Each seed has its own potential germination time. From each seed that succeeds in germinating, a spherical inhibited region grows to prohibit germination of any seed with later potential germination time. We show that under certain conditions on the distribution of the potential germination time, the number of germinated seeds in a large region has an asymptotic normal distribution.

This paper raises the following question: let {Φn(A), A ⊂ ℝd} be a Poisson process with intensity nf(x), x ∈ ℝd and let c(Xi | Φn) be a Voronoi tile with nucleus Xi (a jump point of Φn). Let μ(.) denote Lebesgue measure in ℝd. Is it true that, for any bounded measurable subset B of ℝd, ∑Xi∈Bμ(c(Xi| Φn)) → μ(B) almost surely as n → ∞ only if f > 0 almost everywhere? This statement can be viewed as the strong law of large numbers for Voronoi tessellation. Though the positive answer may seem ‘obvious’, we could not find any such statement, especially for arbitrary measurable B and nonhomogeneous Poisson processes. For B with the boundary of Lebesgue measure 0 the proof is simple. We prove in this paper that the statement is true for ℝ1.

A complete and sufficient statistic is found for various stationary Poisson processes of compact sets with known primary grain. In the particular case of a segment process, the uniformly best unbiased estimator for the length density is the number of segments hitting the sampling window divided by a certain constant and multiplied by the mean segment length.

Siegmund and Worsley (1995) considered the problem of testing for signals with unknown location and scale in a Gaussian random field defined on ℝN. The test statistic was the maximum of a Gaussian random field in an N+1 dimensional ‘scale space’, N dimensions for location and 1 dimension for the scale of a smoothing filter. Scale space is identical to a continuous wavelet transform with a kernel smoother as the wavelet, though the emphasis here is on signal detection rather than image compression or enhancement. Two methods were used to derive an approximate null distribution for N=2 and N=3: one based on the method of volumes of tubes, the other based on the expected Euler characteristic of the excursion set. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to show how the latter method can be extended to higher dimensions, and to apply this more general result to χ2 fields. The result of Siegmund and Worsley (1995) then follows as a special case. In this paper the results are applied to the problem of searching for activation in brain images obtained by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

We consider a parametrization of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) family of term structure of interest rate models that allows a finite-dimensional Markovian representation of the stochastic dynamics. This parametrization results from letting the volatility function depend on time to maturity and on two factors: the instantaneous spot rate and one fixed-maturity forward rate. Our main purpose is an estimation methodology for which we have to model the observations under the historical probability measure. This leads us to consider as an additional third factor the market price of interest rate risk, that connects the historical and the HJM martingale measures. Assuming that the information comes from noisy observations of the fixed-maturity forward rate, the purpose is to estimate recursively, on the basis of this information, the three Markovian factors as well as the parameters in the model, in particular those in the volatility function. This leads to a nonlinear filtering problem, for the solution of which we describe an approximation methodology, based on time discretization and quantization. We prove the convergence of the approximate filters for each of the observed trajectories.

This article deals with the distribution of the view of a random environment as seen by an observer whose location at each moment is determined by the environment. The main application is in statistical fluid mechanics, where the environment consists of a random velocity field and the observer is a particle moving in the velocity field, possibly subject to molecular diffusion. Several results on such Lagrangian observations of the environment have appeared in the literature, beginning with the 1957 dissertation of J. L. Lumley. This article unites these results into a simple unified framework and rounds out the theory with new results in several directions. When the environment is homogeneous, the problem can be re-cast in terms of certain random mappings on the physical space that are based on the random location of the observer. If these mappings preserve the invariant measure on the physical space, then the view from the random location has the same distribution as the view from the origin. If these mappings satisfy the flow property and the environment is stationary, then the succession of Lagrangian observations over time forms a strictly stationary process. In particular, for motion in a homogeneous, stationary, and nondivergent velocity field, the Lagrangian velocity (the velocity of the particle) is strictly stationary, which was first observed by Lumley. In the compressible case, the distribution of a Lagrangian observation has a density with respect to the distribution of the view from the origin, and in some cases convergence in distribution of the Lagrangian observations as time tends to infinity can be shown.

In this paper we study the asymptotic relationship between the loss ratio in a finite buffer system and the overflow probability (the tail of the queue length distribution) in the corresponding infinite buffer system. We model the system by a fluid queue which consists of a server with constant rate c and a fluid input. We provide asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the difference between log P{Q > x} and logPL(x) under different conditions. The conditions for the upper bound are simple and are satisfied by a very large class of input processes. The conditions on the lower bound are more complex but we show that various classes of processes such as Markov modulated and ARMA type Gaussian input processes satisfy them.

Let (Xn) be a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables, with common distribution function F, possibly discontinuous. We use martingale arguments to connect the number of upper records from (Xn) with sums of minima of related random variables. From this relationship we derive a general strong law for the number of records for a wide class of distributions F, including geometric and Poisson.

We define the extension of the so-called ‘martingales in the branching random walk’ in R or C to some Banach algebras B of infinite dimension and give conditions for their convergence, almost surely and in the Lp norm. This abstract approach gives conditions for the simultaneous convergence of uncountable families of such martingales constructed simultaneously in C, the idea being to consider such a family as a function-valued martingale in a Banach algebra of functions. The approach is an alternative to those of Biggins (1989), (1992) and Barral (2000), and it applies to a class of families to which the previous approach did not. We also give a result on the continuity of these multiplicative processes. Our results extend to a varying environment version of the usual construction: instead of attaching i.i.d. copies of a given random vector to the nodes of the tree ∪n≥0N+n, the distribution of the vector depends on the node in the multiplicative cascade. In this context, when B=R and in the nonnegative case, we generalize the measure on the boundary of the tree usually related to the construction; then we evaluate the dimension of this nonstatistically self-similar measure. In the self-similar case, our convergence results make it possible to simultaneously define uncountable families of such measures, and then to estimate their dimension simultaneously.

The asymptotic behaviour of an occupation-time process associated with alternating renewal processes is investigated in the infinite mean cycle case. The limit theorems obtained extend some asymptotic results proved by Dynkin (1955), Lamperti (1958) and Erickson (1970) for the classical spent lifetime process. Some new phenomena are also presented.

We prove that for a class of anisotropic long-range percolation models for which connection probabilities p<x,z> satisfy some regularity properties, and such that ∑z∈Z2p<x,z> = ∞, percolation still will occur even if we truncate all edges whose length exceeds some constant (which in this case depends on the family of connectivity probabilities {p<x,z>). We also present an example of dependent long-range percolation model for which this is not true.

Connections between classification and lumpability in the stochastic Hopfield model (SHM) are explored and developed. A simplification of the SHM's complexity based upon its inherent lumpability is derived. Contributions resulting from this reduction in complexity include: (i) computationally feasible classification time computations; (ii) a development of techniques for enumerating the stationary distribution of the SHM's energy function; and (iii) a characterization of the set of possible absorbing states of the Markov chain associated with the zero temperature SHM.