We consider a stochastic SIR (susceptible $\rightarrow$ infective $\rightarrow$ removed) model in which the infectious periods are modulated by a collection of independent and identically distributed Feller processes. Each infected individual is associated with one of these processes, the trajectories of which determine the duration of his infectious period, his contamination rate, and his type of removal (e.g. death or immunization). We use a martingale approach to derive the distribution of the final epidemic size and severity for this model and provide some general examples. Next, we focus on a single infected individual facing a given number of susceptibles, and we determine the distribution of his outcome (number of contaminations, severity, type of removal). Using a discrete-time formulation of the model, we show that this distribution also provides us with an alternative, more stable method to compute the final epidemic outcome distribution.

Let $\{X_n\}_{n\in{\mathbb{N}}}$ be an ${\mathbb{X}}$-valued iterated function system (IFS) of Lipschitz maps defined as $X_0 \in {\mathbb{X}}$ and for $n\geq 1$, $X_n\;:\!=\;F(X_{n-1},\vartheta_n)$, where $\{\vartheta_n\}_{n \ge 1}$ are independent and identically distributed random variables with common probability distribution $\mathfrak{p}$, $F(\cdot,\cdot)$ is Lipschitz continuous in the first variable, and $X_0$ is independent of $\{\vartheta_n\}_{n \ge 1}$. Under parametric perturbation of both F and $\mathfrak{p}$, we are interested in the robustness of the V-geometrical ergodicity property of $\{X_n\}_{n\in{\mathbb{N}}}$, of its invariant probability measure, and finally of the probability distribution of $X_n$. Specifically, we propose a pattern of assumptions for studying such robustness properties for an IFS. This pattern is implemented for the autoregressive processes with autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic errors, and for IFS under roundoff error or under thresholding/truncation. Moreover, we provide a general set of assumptions covering the classical Feller-type hypotheses for an IFS to be a V-geometrical ergodic process. An accurate bound for the rate of convergence is also provided.

We prove that for a discrete determinantal process the BK inequality occurs for increasing events generated by simple points. We also give some elementary but nonetheless appealing relationships between a discrete determinantal process and the well-known CS decomposition.

We consider the asset price as the weak solution to a stochastic differential equation driven by both a Brownian motion and the counting process martingale whose predictable compensator follows shot-noise and Hawkes processes. In this framework, we discuss the Esscher martingale measure where the conditions for its existence are detailed. This generalizes certain relationships not yet encountered in the literature.

We consider a risk model with a counting process whose intensity is a Markovian shot-noise process, to resolve one of the disadvantages of the Cramér–Lundberg model, namely the constant intensity of the Poisson process. Due to this structure, we can apply the theory of piecewise deterministic Markov processes on a multivariate process containing the intensity and the reserve process, which allows us to identify a family of martingales. Eventually, we use change of measure techniques to derive an upper bound for the ruin probability in this model. Exploiting a recurrent structure of the shot-noise process, even the asymptotic behaviour of the ruin probability can be determined.

We present a recurrence–transience classification for discrete-time Markov chains on manifolds with negative curvature. Our classification depends only on geometric quantities associated to the increments of the chain, defined via the Riemannian exponential map. We deduce that a recurrent chain that has zero average drift at every point cannot be uniformly elliptic, unlike in the Euclidean case. We also give natural examples of zero-drift recurrent chains on negatively curved manifolds, including on a stochastically incomplete manifold.

An edge flipping is a non-reversible Markov chain on a given connected graph, as defined in Chung and Graham (2012). In the same paper, edge flipping eigenvalues and stationary distributions for some classes of graphs were identified. We further study edge flipping spectral properties to show a lower bound for the rate of convergence in the case of regular graphs. Moreover, we show by a coupling argument that a cutoff occurs at $\frac{1}{4} n \log n$ for the edge flipping on the complete graph.

Negative dependence of sequences of random variables is often an interesting characteristic of their distribution, as well as a useful tool for studying various asymptotic results, including central limit theorems, Poisson approximations, the rate of increase of the maximum, and more. In the study of probability models of tournaments, negative dependence of participants’ outcomes arises naturally, with application to various asymptotic results. In particular, the property of negative orthant dependence was proved in several articles for different tournament models, with a special proof for each model. In this note we unify these results by proving a stronger property, negative association, a generalization leading to a very simple proof. We also present a natural example of a knockout tournament where the scores are negatively orthant dependent but not negatively associated. The proof requires a new result on a preservation property of negative orthant dependence that is of independent interest.

Several information measures have been proposed and studied in the literature. One such measure is extropy, a complementary dual function of entropy. Its meaning and related aging notions have not yet been studied in great detail. In this paper, we first illustrate that extropy information ranks the uniformity of a wide array of absolutely continuous families. We then discuss several theoretical merits of extropy. We also provide a closed-form expression of it for finite mixture distributions. Finally, the dynamic versions of extropy are also discussed, specifically the residual extropy and past extropy measures.

This article derives quantitative limit theorems for multivariate Poisson and Poisson process approximations. Employing the solution of the Stein equation for Poisson random variables, we obtain an explicit bound for the multivariate Poisson approximation of random vectors in the Wasserstein distance. The bound is then utilized in the context of point processes to provide a Poisson process approximation result in terms of a new metric called $d_\pi$ , stronger than the total variation distance, defined as the supremum over all Wasserstein distances between random vectors obtained by evaluating the point processes on arbitrary collections of disjoint sets. As applications, the multivariate Poisson approximation of the sum of m-dependent Bernoulli random vectors, the Poisson process approximation of point processes of U-statistic structure, and the Poisson process approximation of point processes with Papangelou intensity are considered. Our bounds in $d_\pi$ are as good as those already available in the literature.

We consider a Lévy process Y(t) that is not continuously observed, but rather inspected at Poisson( $\omega$ ) moments only, over an exponentially distributed time $T_\beta$ with parameter $\beta$ . The focus lies on the analysis of the distribution of the running maximum at such inspection moments up to $T_\beta$ , denoted by $Y_{\beta,\omega}$ . Our main result is a decomposition: we derive a remarkable distributional equality that contains $Y_{\beta,\omega}$ as well as the running maximum process $\bar Y(t)$ at the exponentially distributed times $T_\beta$ and $T_{\beta+\omega}$ . Concretely, $\overline{Y}(T_\beta)$ can be written as the sum of two independent random variables that are distributed as $Y_{\beta,\omega}$ and $\overline{Y}(T_{\beta+\omega})$ . The distribution of $Y_{\beta,\omega}$ can be identified more explicitly in the two special cases of a spectrally positive and a spectrally negative Lévy process. As an illustrative example of the potential of our results, we show how to determine the asymptotic behavior of the bankruptcy probability in the Cramér–Lundberg insurance risk model.

We construct a class of non-reversible Metropolis kernels as a multivariate extension of the guided-walk kernel proposed by Gustafson (Statist. Comput. 8, 1998). The main idea of our method is to introduce a projection that maps a state space to a totally ordered group. By using Haar measure, we construct a novel Markov kernel termed the Haar mixture kernel, which is of interest in its own right. This is achieved by inducing a topological structure to the totally ordered group. Our proposed method, the $\Delta$-guided Metropolis–Haar kernel, is constructed by using the Haar mixture kernel as a proposal kernel. The proposed non-reversible kernel is at least 10 times better than the random-walk Metropolis kernel and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo kernel for the logistic regression and a discretely observed stochastic process in terms of effective sample size per second.

In the classical framework, a random walk on a group is a Markov chain with independent and identically distributed increments. In some sense, random walks are time and space homogeneous. This paper is devoted to a class of inhomogeneous random walks on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ termed ‘Markov additive processes’ (also known as Markov random walks, random walks with internal degrees of freedom, or semi-Markov processes). In this model, the increments of the walk are still independent but their distributions are dictated by a Markov chain, termed the internal Markov chain. While this model is largely studied in the literature, most of the results involve internal Markov chains whose operator is quasi-compact. This paper extends two results for more general internal operators: a local limit theorem and a sufficient criterion for their transience. These results are thereafter applied to a new family of models of drifted random walks on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ .

The notion of ordered system signature, originally defined for independent and identical coherent systems, is first extended to the case of independent and non-identical coherent systems, and then some key properties that help simplify its computation are established. Through its use, a dynamic ordered system signature is defined next, which facilitates a systematic study of dynamic properties of several coherent systems under a life test. The theoretical results established here are then illustrated through some specific examples. Finally, the usefulness in the evaluation of aging used systems of the concepts introduced is demonstrated.

In this paper we study a class of optimal stopping problems under g-expectation, that is, the cost function is described by the solution of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs). Primarily, we assume that the reward process is $L\exp\bigl(\mu\sqrt{2\log\!(1+L)}\bigr)$ -integrable with $\mu>\mu_0$ for some critical value $\mu_0$ . This integrability is weaker than $L^p$ -integrability for any $p>1$ , so it covers a comparatively wide class of optimal stopping problems. To reach our goal, we introduce a class of reflected backward stochastic differential equations (RBSDEs) with $L\exp\bigl(\mu\sqrt{2\log\!(1+L)}\bigr)$ -integrable parameters. We prove the existence, uniqueness, and comparison theorem for these RBSDEs under Lipschitz-type assumptions on the coefficients. This allows us to characterize the value function of our optimal stopping problem as the unique solution of such RBSDEs.

We study the coupon collector’s problem with group drawings. Assume there are n different coupons. At each time precisely s of the n coupons are drawn, where all choices are supposed to have equal probability. The focus lies on the fluctuations, as $n\to\infty$, of the number $Z_{n,s}(k_n)$ of coupons that have not been drawn in the first $k_n$ drawings. Using a size-biased coupling construction together with Stein’s method for normal approximation, a quantitative central limit theorem for $Z_{n,s}(k_n)$ is shown for the case that $k_n=({n/s})(\alpha\log(n)+x)$, where $0<\alpha<1$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}$. The same coupling construction is used to retrieve a quantitative Poisson limit theorem in the boundary case $\alpha=1$, again using Stein’s method.

We present a Markov chain on the n-dimensional hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ which satisfies $t_{{\rm mix}}^{(n)}(\varepsilon) = n[1 + o(1)]$ . This Markov chain alternates between random and deterministic moves, and we prove that the chain has a cutoff with a window of size at most $O(n^{0.5+\delta})$ , where $\delta>0$ . The deterministic moves correspond to a linear shift register.

We prove existence and uniqueness for the solution of a class of mixed fractional stochastic differential equations with discontinuous drift driven by both standard and fractional Brownian motion. Additionally, we establish a generalized Itô rule valid for functions with an absolutely continuous derivative and applicable to solutions of mixed fractional stochastic differential equations with Lipschitz coefficients, which plays a key role in our proof of existence and uniqueness. The proof of such a formula is new and relies on showing the existence of a density of the law under mild assumptions on the diffusion coefficient.

Let a random geometric graph be defined in the supercritical regime for the existence of a unique infinite connected component in Euclidean space. Consider the first-passage percolation model with independent and identically distributed random variables on the random infinite connected component. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of the asymptotic shape, and we show that the shape is a Euclidean ball. We give some examples exhibiting the result for Bernoulli percolation and the Richardson model. In the latter case we further show that it converges weakly to a nonstandard branching process in the joint limit of large intensities and slow passage times.

In this paper, we analyze a two-queue random time-limited Markov-modulated polling model. In the first part of the paper, we investigate the fluid version: fluid arrives at the two queues as two independent flows with deterministic rate. There is a single server that serves both queues at constant speeds. The server spends an exponentially distributed amount of time in each queue. After the completion of such a visit time to one queue, the server instantly switches to the other queue, i.e., there is no switch-over time.

For this model, we first derive the Laplace–Stieltjes transform (LST) of the stationary marginal fluid content/workload at each queue. Subsequently, we derive a functional equation for the LST of the two-dimensional workload distribution that leads to a Riemann–Hilbert boundary value problem (BVP). After taking a heavy-traffic limit, and restricting ourselves to the symmetric case, the BVP simplifies and can be solved explicitly.

In the second part of the paper, allowing for more general (Lévy) input processes and server switching policies, we investigate the transient process limit of the joint workload in heavy traffic. Again solving a BVP, we determine the stationary distribution of the limiting process. We show that, in the symmetric case, this distribution coincides with our earlier solution of the BVP, implying that in this case the two limits (stationarity and heavy traffic) commute.