This collection honours Ron Doney’s work and includes invited articles by his collaborators and friends. After an introduction reviewing Ron Doney’s mathematical achievements and how they have influenced the field, the contributed papers cover both discrete-time processes, including random walks and variants thereof, and continuous-time processes, including Lévy processes and diffusions. A good number of the articles are focused on classical fluctuation theory and its ramifications, the area for which Ron Doney is best known.
This collection honours Ron Doney's work and includes invited articles by his collaborators and friends. After an introduction reviewing Ron Doney's mathematical achievements and how they have influenced the field, the contributed papers cover both discrete-time processes, including random walks and variants thereof, and continuous-time processes, including Lévy processes and diffusions. A good number of the articles are focused on classical fluctuation theory and its ramifications, the area for which Ron Doney is best known.
Lévy processes are the natural continuous-time analogue of random walks and form a rich class of stochastic processes around which a robust mathematical theory exists. Their application appears in the theory of many areas of classical and modern stochastic processes including storage models, renewal processes, insurance risk models, optimal stopping problems, mathematical finance, continuous-state branching processes and positive self-similar Markov processes. This textbook is based on a series of graduate courses concerning the theory and application of Lévy processes from the perspective of their path fluctuations. Central to the presentation is the decomposition of paths in terms of excursions from the running maximum as well as an understanding of short- and long-term behaviour. The book aims to be mathematically rigorous while still providing an intuitive feel for underlying principles. The results and applications often focus on the case of Lévy processes with jumps in only one direction, for which recent theoretical advances have yielded a higher degree of mathematical tractability. The second edition additionally addresses recent developments in the potential analysis of subordinators, Wiener-Hopf theory, the theory of scale functions and their application to ruin theory, as well as including an extensive overview of the classical and modern theory of positive self-similar Markov processes. Each chapter has a comprehensive set of exercises.
The purpose of this text is to bring graduate students specializing in probability theory to current research topics at the interface of combinatorics and stochastic processes. There is particular focus on the theory of random combinatorial structures such as partitions, permutations, trees, forests, and mappings, and connections between the asymptotic theory of enumeration of such structures and the theory of stochastic processes like Brownian motion and Poisson processes.
This eagerly awaited textbook covers everything the graduate student in probability wants to know about Brownian motion, as well as the latest research in the area. Starting with the construction of Brownian motion, the book then proceeds to sample path properties like continuity and nowhere differentiability. Notions of fractal dimension are introduced early and are used throughout the book to describe fine properties of Brownian paths. The relation of Brownian motion and random walk is explored from several viewpoints, including a development of the theory of Brownian local times from random walk embeddings. Stochastic integration is introduced as a tool and an accessible treatment of the potential theory of Brownian motion clears the path for an extensive treatment of intersections of Brownian paths. An investigation of exceptional points on the Brownian path and an appendix on SLE processes, by Oded Schramm and Wendelin Werner, lead directly to recent research themes.
This engaging introduction to random processes provides students with the critical tools needed to design and evaluate engineering systems that must operate reliably in uncertain environments. A brief review of probability theory and real analysis of deterministic functions sets the stage for understanding random processes, whilst the underlying measure theoretic notions are explained in an intuitive, straightforward style. Students will learn to manage the complexity of randomness through the use of simple classes of random processes, statistical means and correlations, asymptotic analysis, sampling, and effective algorithms. Key topics covered include: • Calculus of random processes in linear systems • Kalman and Wiener filtering • Hidden Markov models for statistical inference • The estimation maximization (EM) algorithm • An introduction to martingales and concentration inequalities. Understanding of the key concepts is reinforced through over 100 worked examples and 300 thoroughly tested homework problems (half of which are solved in detail at the end of the book).
This book introduces several remarkable new probabilistic objects that combine spatial motion with a continuous branching phenomenon and are closely related to certain semilinear partial differential equations (PDE). The Brownian snake approach is used to give a powerful representation of superprocesses and also to investigate connections between superprocesses and PDEs. These are notable because almost every important probabilistic question corresponds to a significant analytic problem.
