Following Bradonjić and Saniee, we study a model of bootstrap percolation on the Gilbert random geometric graph on the 2-dimensional torus. In this model, the expected number of vertices of the graph is n, and the expected degree of a vertex is $a\log n$ for some fixed $a>1$. Each vertex is added with probability p to a set $A_0$ of initially infected vertices. Vertices subsequently become infected if they have at least $ \theta a \log n $ infected neighbours. Here $p, \theta \in [0,1]$ are taken to be fixed constants.

We show that if $\theta < (1+p)/2$, then a sufficiently large local outbreak leads with high probability to the infection spreading globally, with all but o(n) vertices eventually becoming infected. On the other hand, for $ \theta > (1+p)/2$, even if one adversarially infects every vertex inside a ball of radius $O(\sqrt{\log n} )$, with high probability the infection will spread to only o(n) vertices beyond those that were initially infected.

In addition we give some bounds on the $(a, p, \theta)$ regions ensuring the emergence of large local outbreaks or the existence of islands of vertices that never become infected. We also give a complete picture of the (surprisingly complex) behaviour of the analogous 1-dimensional bootstrap percolation model on the circle. Finally we raise a number of problems, and in particular make a conjecture on an ‘almost no percolation or almost full percolation’ dichotomy which may be of independent interest.

We study a stochastic differential equation with an unbounded drift and general Hölder continuous noise of order $\lambda \in (0,1)$. The corresponding equation turns out to have a unique solution that, depending on a particular shape of the drift, either stays above some continuous function or has continuous upper and lower bounds. Under some mild assumptions on the noise, we prove that the solution has moments of all orders. In addition, we provide its connection to the solution of some Skorokhod reflection problem. As an illustration of our results and motivation for applications, we also suggest two stochastic volatility models which we regard as generalizations of the CIR and CEV processes. We complete the study by providing a numerical scheme for the solution.

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis–Hastings (MH) algorithms. Recently, acceptance probabilities other than MH are being employed in problems with intractable target distributions. There are few resources available on tuning the Gaussian proposal distributions for this situation. We obtain optimal scaling results for a general class of acceptance functions, which includes Barker’s and lazy MH. In particular, optimal values for Barker’s algorithm are derived and found to be significantly different from that obtained for the MH algorithm. Our theoretical conclusions are supported by numerical simulations indicating that when the optimal proposal variance is unknown, tuning to the optimal acceptance probability remains an effective strategy.

In this paper, we study the optimal multiple stopping problem under the filtration-consistent nonlinear expectations. The reward is given by a set of random variables satisfying some appropriate assumptions, rather than a process that is right-continuous with left limits. We first construct the optimal stopping time for the single stopping problem, which is no longer given by the first hitting time of processes. We then prove by induction that the value function of the multiple stopping problem can be interpreted as the one for the single stopping problem associated with a new reward family, which allows us to construct the optimal multiple stopping times. If the reward family satisfies some strong regularity conditions, we show that the reward family and the value functions can be aggregated by some progressive processes. Hence, the optimal stopping times can be represented as hitting times.

A system of interacting multi-class finite-state jump processes is analyzed. The model under consideration consists of a block-structured network with dynamically changing multi-color nodes. The interactions are local and described through local empirical measures. Two levels of heterogeneity are considered: between and within the blocks where the nodes are labeled into two types. The central nodes are those connected only to nodes from the same block, whereas the peripheral nodes are connected to both nodes from the same block and nodes from other blocks. Limits of such systems as the number of nodes tends to infinity are investigated. In particular, under specific regularity conditions, propagation of chaos and the law of large numbers are established in a multi-population setting. Moreover, it is shown that, as the number of nodes goes to infinity, the behavior of the system can be represented by the solution of a McKean–Vlasov system. Then, we prove large deviations principles for the vectors of empirical measures and the empirical processes, which extends the classical results of Dawson and Gärtner (Stochastics 20, 1987) and Léonard (Ann. Inst. H. Poincaré Prob. Statist. 31, 1995).

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.

Using one-dimensional branching Brownian motion in a periodic environment, we give probabilistic proofs of the asymptotics and uniqueness of pulsating traveling waves of the Fisher–Kolmogorov–Petrovskii–Piskounov (F-KPP) equation in a periodic environment. This paper is a sequel to ‘Branching Brownian motion in a periodic environment and existence of pulsating travelling waves’ (Ren et al., 2022), in which we proved the existence of the pulsating traveling waves in the supercritical and critical cases, using the limits of the additive and derivative martingales of branching Brownian motion in a periodic environment.

We adapt the classical definition of locally stationary processes in discrete time (see e.g. Dahlhaus, ‘Locally stationary processes’, in Time Series Analysis: Methods and Applications (2012)) to the continuous-time setting and obtain equivalent representations in the time and frequency domains. From this, a unique time-varying spectral density is derived using the Wigner–Ville spectrum. As an example, we investigate time-varying Lévy-driven state space processes, including the class of time-varying Lévy-driven CARMA processes. First, the connection between these two classes of processes is examined. Considering a sequence of time-varying Lévy-driven state space processes, we then give sufficient conditions on the coefficient functions that ensure local stationarity with respect to the given definition.

We show that load-sharing models (a very special class of multivariate probability models for nonnegative random variables) can be used to obtain basic results about a multivariate extension of stochastic precedence and related paradoxes. Such results can be applied in several different fields. In particular, applications of them can be developed in the context of paradoxes which arise in voting theory. Also, an application to the notion of probability signature may be of interest, in the field of systems reliability.

The basic idea of voting protocols is that nodes query a sample of other nodes and adjust their own opinion throughout several rounds based on the proportion of the sampled opinions. In the classic model, it is assumed that all nodes have the same weight. We study voting protocols for heterogeneous weights with respect to fairness. A voting protocol is fair if the influence on the eventual outcome of a given participant is linear in its weight. Previous work used sampling with replacement to construct a fair voting scheme. However, it was shown that using greedy sampling, i.e., sampling with replacement until a given number of distinct elements is chosen, turns out to be more robust and performant.

In this paper, we study fairness of voting protocols with greedy sampling and propose a voting scheme that is asymptotically fair for a broad class of weight distributions. We complement our theoretical findings with numerical results and present several open questions and conjectures.

We develop a novel Monte Carlo algorithm for the vector consisting of the supremum, the time at which the supremum is attained, and the position at a given (constant) time of an exponentially tempered Lévy process. The algorithm, based on the increments of the process without tempering, converges geometrically fast (as a function of the computational cost) for discontinuous and locally Lipschitz functions of the vector. We prove that the corresponding multilevel Monte Carlo estimator has optimal computational complexity (i.e. of order $\varepsilon^{-2}$ if the mean squared error is at most $\varepsilon^2$) and provide its central limit theorem (CLT). Using the CLT we construct confidence intervals for barrier option prices and various risk measures based on drawdown under the tempered stable (CGMY) model calibrated/estimated on real-world data. We provide non-asymptotic and asymptotic comparisons of our algorithm with existing approximations, leading to rule-of-thumb principles guiding users to the best method for a given set of parameters. We illustrate the performance of the algorithm with numerical examples.

We consider a dual risk model with constant expense rate and i.i.d. exponentially distributed gains $C_i$ ( $i=1,2,\dots$ ) that arrive according to a renewal process with general interarrival times. We add to this classical dual risk model the proportional gain feature; that is, if the surplus process just before the ith arrival is at level u, then for $a>0$ the capital jumps up to the level $(1+a)u+C_i$ . The ruin probability and the distribution of the time to ruin are determined. We furthermore identify the value of discounted cumulative dividend payments, for the case of a Poisson arrival process of proportional gains. In the dividend calculations, we also consider a random perturbation of our basic risk process modeled by an independent Brownian motion with drift.

Consider a financial market with nonnegative semimartingales which does not need to have a numéraire. We are interested in the absence of arbitrage in the sense that no self-financing portfolio gives rise to arbitrage opportunities, where we are allowed to add a savings account to the market. We will prove that in this sense the market is free of arbitrage if and only if there exists an equivalent local martingale deflator which is a multiplicative special semimartingale. In this case, the additional savings account relates to the finite-variation part of the multiplicative decomposition of the deflator.

The Minkowski functionals, including the Euler characteristic statistics, are standard tools for morphological analysis in cosmology. Motivated by cosmic research, we examine the Minkowski functional of the excursion set for an isotropic central limit random field, whose k-point correlation functions (kth-order cumulants) have the same structure as that assumed in cosmic research. Using 3- and 4-point correlation functions, we derive the asymptotic expansions of the Euler characteristic density, which is the building block of the Minkowski functional. The resulting formula reveals the types of non-Gaussianity that cannot be captured by the Minkowski functionals. As an example, we consider an isotropic chi-squared random field and confirm that the asymptotic expansion accurately approximates the true Euler characteristic density.

Consider Bernoulli bond percolation on a graph nicely embedded in hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^d$ in such a way that it admits a transitive action by isometries of $\mathbb{H}^d$ . Let $p_{\text{a}}$ be the supremum of all percolation parameters such that no point at infinity of $\mathbb{H}^d$ lies in the boundary of the cluster of a fixed vertex with positive probability. Then for any parameter $p < p_{\text{a}}$ , almost surely every percolation cluster is thin-ended, i.e. has only one-point boundaries of ends.

We use probabilistic methods to study properties of mean-field models, which arise as large-scale limits of certain particle systems with mean-field interaction. The underlying particle system is such that n particles move forward on the real line. Specifically, each particle ‘jumps forward’ at some time points, with the instantaneous rate of jumps given by a decreasing function of the particle’s location quantile within the overall distribution of particle locations. A mean-field model describes the evolution of the particles’ distribution when n is large. It is essentially a solution to an integro-differential equation within a certain class. Our main results concern the existence and uniqueness of—and attraction to—mean-field models which are traveling waves, under general conditions on the jump-rate function and the jump-size distribution.

Given a spectrally negative Lévy process, we predict, in an $L_1$ sense, the last passage time of the process below zero before an independent exponential time. This optimal prediction problem generalises [2], where the infinite-horizon problem is solved. Using a similar argument as that in [24], we show that this optimal prediction problem is equivalent to solving an optimal prediction problem in a finite-horizon setting. Surprisingly (unlike the infinite-horizon problem), an optimal stopping time is based on a curve that is killed at the moment the mean of the exponential time is reached. That is, an optimal stopping time is the first time the process crosses above a non-negative, continuous, and non-increasing curve depending on time. This curve and the value function are characterised as a solution of a system of nonlinear integral equations which can be understood as a generalisation of the free boundary equations (see e.g. [21, Chapter IV.14.1]) in the presence of jumps. As an example, we numerically calculate this curve in the Brownian motion case and for a compound Poisson process with exponential-sized jumps perturbed by a Brownian motion.

We consider infinitely wide multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) which are limits of standard deep feed-forward neural networks. We assume that, for each layer, the weights of an MLP are initialized with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples from either a light-tailed (finite-variance) or a heavy-tailed distribution in the domain of attraction of a symmetric $\alpha$-stable distribution, where $\alpha\in(0,2]$ may depend on the layer. For the bias terms of the layer, we assume i.i.d. initializations with a symmetric $\alpha$-stable distribution having the same $\alpha$ parameter as that layer. Non-stable heavy-tailed weight distributions are important since they have been empirically seen to emerge in trained deep neural nets such as the ResNet and VGG series, and proven to naturally arise via stochastic gradient descent. The introduction of heavy-tailed weights broadens the class of priors in Bayesian neural networks. In this work we extend a recent result of Favaro, Fortini, and Peluchetti (2020) to show that the vector of pre-activation values at all nodes of a given hidden layer converges in the limit, under a suitable scaling, to a vector of i.i.d. random variables with symmetric $\alpha$-stable distributions, $\alpha\in(0,2]$.

The rich-get-richer rule reinforces actions that have been frequently chosen in the past. What happens to the evolution of individuals’ inclinations to choose an action when agents interact? Interaction tends to homogenize, while each individual dynamics tends to reinforce its own position. Interacting stochastic systems of reinforced processes have recently been considered in many papers, in which the asymptotic behavior is proven to exhibit almost sure synchronization. In this paper we consider models where, even if interaction among agents is present, absence of synchronization may happen because of the choice of an individual nonlinear reinforcement. We show how these systems can naturally be considered as models for coordination games or technological or opinion dynamics.