This volume of the Encyclopaedia is a survey of stochastic calculus, an increasingly important part of probability, authored by well-known experts in the field. The book addresses graduate students and researchers in probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as physicists and engineers who need to apply stochastic methods.
Aimed primarily at graduate students and researchers, this text is a comprehensive course in modern probability theory and its measure-theoretical foundations. It covers a wide variety of topics, many of which are not usually found in introductory textbooks. The theory is developed rigorously and in a self-contained way, with the chapters on measure theory interlaced with the probabilistic chapters in order to display the power of the abstract concepts in the world of probability theory. In addition, plenty of figures, computer simulations, biographic details of key mathematicians, and a wealth of examples support and enliven the presentation.
Following its 1963 publication, this volume served as the standard advanced text in probability theory. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, the treatment includes extensive introductory material.
This text develops the necessary background in probability theory underlying diverse treatments of stochastic processes and their wide-ranging applications. In this second edition, the text has been reorganized for didactic purposes, new exercises have been added and basic theory has been expanded. General Markov dependent sequences and their convergence to equilibrium is the subject of an entirely new chapter. The introduction of conditional expectation and conditional probability very early in the text maintains the pedagogic innovation of the first edition; conditional expectation is illustrated in detail in the context of an expanded treatment of martingales, the Markov property, and the strong Markov property. Weak convergence of probabilities on metric spaces and Brownian motion are two topics to highlight. A selection of large deviation and/or concentration inequalities ranging from those of Chebyshev, Cramer–Chernoff, Bahadur–Rao, to Hoeffding have been added, with illustrative comparisons of their use in practice. This also includes a treatment of the Berry–Esseen error estimate in the central limit theorem. The authors assume mathematical maturity at a graduate level; otherwise the book is suitable for students with varying levels of background in analysis and measure theory. For the reader who needs refreshers, theorems from analysis and measure theory used in the main text are provided in comprehensive appendices, along with their proofs, for ease of reference. Rabi Bhattacharya is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. Edward Waymire is Professor of Mathematics at Oregon State University. Both authors have co-authored numerous books, including a series of four upcoming graduate textbooks in stochastic processes with applications.
This book contains about 500 exercises consisting mostly of special cases and examples, second thoughts and alternative arguments, natural extensions, and some novel departures. With a few obvious exceptions they are neither profound nor trivial, and hints and comments are appended to many of them. If they tend to be somewhat inbred, at least they are relevant to the text and should help in its digestion. As a bold venture I have marked a few of them with a * to indicate a "must", although no rigid standard of selection has been used. Some of these are needed in the book, but in any case the reader's study of the text will be more complete after he has tried at least those problems.
This volume of the Encyclopaedia is a survey of stochastic calculus, an increasingly important part of probability, authored by well-known experts in the field. The book addresses graduate students and researchers in probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as physicists and engineers who need to apply stochastic methods.
This fourth edition contains several additions. The main ones con cern three closely related topics: Brownian motion, functional limit distributions, and random walks. Besides the power and ingenuity of their methods and the depth and beauty of their results, their importance is fast growing in Analysis as well as in theoretical and applied Proba bility. These additions increased the book to an unwieldy size and it had to be split into two volumes. About half of the first volume is devoted to an elementary introduc tion, then to mathematical foundations and basic probability concepts and tools. The second half is devoted to a detailed study of Independ ence which played and continues to playa central role both by itself and as a catalyst. The main additions consist of a section on convergence of probabilities on metric spaces and a chapter whose first section on domains of attrac tion completes the study of the Central limit problem, while the second one is devoted to random walks. About a third of the second volume is devoted to conditioning and properties of sequences of various types of dependence. The other two thirds are devoted to random functions; the last Part on Elements of random analysis is more sophisticated. The main addition consists of a chapter on Brownian motion and limit distributions.
