In this paper we study the asymptotic properties of the canonical plugin estimates for law-invariant coherent risk measures. Under rather mild conditions not relying on the explicit representation of the risk measure under consideration, we first prove a central limit theorem for independent and identically distributed data, and then extend it to the case of weakly dependent data. Finally, a number of illustrating examples is presented.

Autoregressive processes are intensively studied in statistics and other fields of applied stochastics. For many applications, the overshoot and the threshold time are of special interest. When the upward innovations are in the class of phase-type distributions, we determine the joint distribution of these two quantities and apply this result to problems of optimal stopping. Using a principle of continuous fit, this leads to explicit solutions.

We define a class of stochastic processes, denoted as marked rational arrival processes (MRAPs), which is an extension of matrix exponential distributions and rational arrival processes. Continuous-time Markov processes with labeled transitions are a subclass of this more general model class. New equivalence relations between processes are defined, and it is shown that these equivalence relations are natural extensions of strong and weak lumpability and the corresponding bisimulation relations that have been defined for Markov processes. If a general rational process is equivalent to a Markov process, it can be used in numerical analysis techniques instead of the Markov process. This observation allows one to apply MRAPs like Markov processes and since the new equivalence relations are more general than lumpability and bisimulation, it is sometimes possible to find smaller representations of given processes. Finally, we show that the equivalence is preserved by the composition of MRAPs and can therefore be exploited in compositional modeling.

We consider a sequence of cycles of exponential single-server nodes, where the number of nodes is fixed and the number of customers grows unboundedly. We prove a central limit theorem for the cycle time distribution. We investigate the idle time structure of the bottleneck nodes and the joint sojourn time distribution that a test customer observes at the nonbottleneck nodes during a cycle. Furthermore, we study the filling behaviour of the bottleneck nodes, and show that the single bottleneck and multiple bottleneck cases lead to different asymptotic behaviours.

We propose an efficient semi-numerical approach to compute the steady-state probability distribution for the number of requests at arbitrary and at arrival time instants in PH/M/c-like systems with homogeneous servers in which the inter-arrival time distribution is represented by an acyclic set of memoryless phases. Our method is based on conditional probabilities and results in a simple computationally stable recurrence. It avoids the explicit manipulation of potentially large matrices and involves no iteration. Owing to the use of conditional probabilities, it delays the onset of numerical issues related to floating-point underflow as the number of servers and/or phases increases. For generalized Coxian distributions, the computational complexity of the proposed approach grows linearly with the number of phases in the distribution.

We use a change-of-variable formula in the framework of functions of bounded variation to derive an explicit formula for the Fourier transform of the level crossing function of shot noise processes with jumps. We illustrate the result in some examples and give some applications. In particular, it allows us to study the asymptotic behavior of the mean number of level crossings as the intensity of the Poisson point process of the shot noise process goes to infinity.

We consider the problem of twenty questions with noisy answers, in which we seek to find a target by repeatedly choosing a set, asking an oracle whether the target lies in this set, and obtaining an answer corrupted by noise. Starting with a prior distribution on the target's location, we seek to minimize the expected entropy of the posterior distribution. We formulate this problem as a dynamic program and show that any policy optimizing the one-step expected reduction in entropy is also optimal over the full horizon. Two such Bayes optimal policies are presented: one generalizes the probabilistic bisection policy due to Horstein and the other asks a deterministic set of questions. We study the structural properties of the latter, and illustrate its use in a computer vision application.

We study the smooth-fit property of the American put price with finite maturity in an exponential Lévy model when the underlying stock pays dividends at a continuous rate. As in the perpetual case, a regularity property is sufficient for smooth fit to occur. We also derive conditions on the Lévy measure under which smooth fit fails.

In the last few years there has been renewed interest in the classical control problem of de Finetti (1957) for the case where the underlying source of randomness is a spectrally negative Lévy process. In particular, a significant step forward was made by Loeffen (2008), who showed that a natural and very general condition on the underlying Lévy process which allows one to proceed with the analysis of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is that its Lévy measure is absolutely continuous, having completely monotone density. In this paper we consider de Finetti's control problem, but with the restriction that control strategies are absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure. This problem has been considered by Asmussen and Taksar (1997), Jeanblanc-Picqué and Shiryaev (1995), and Boguslavskaya (2006) in the diffusive case, and Gerber and Shiu (2006) for the case of a Cramér-Lundberg process with exponentially distributed jumps. We show the robustness of the condition that the underlying Lévy measure has a completely monotone density and establish an explicit optimal strategy for this case that envelopes the aforementioned existing results. The explicit optimal strategy in question is the so-called refraction strategy.

We give a simple method to approximate multidimensional exponentially tempered stable processes and show that the approximating process converges in the Skorokhod topology to the tempered process. The approximation is based on the generation of a random angle and a random variable with a lower-dimensional Lévy measure. We then show that if an arbitrarily small normal random variable is added, the marginal densities converge uniformly at an almost linear rate, providing a critical tool to assess the performance of existing particle tracking codes.

We consider the problem of finding an optimal betting strategy for a house-banked casino card game that is played for several coups before reshuffling. The sampling without replacement makes it possible to take advantage of the changes in the expected value as the deck is depleted, making large bets when the game is advantageous. Using such a strategy, which is easy to implement, is known as card counting. We consider the case of a large number of decks, making an approximation to continuous time possible. A limit law of the return process is found and the optimal card counting strategy is derived. This continuous-time strategy is shown to be a natural analog of the discrete-time strategy where the so-called effects of removal are replaced by the infinitesimal generator of the card process.

The distributions for continuous, discrete, and conditional discrete scan statistics are studied. The approach of finite Markov chain imbedding, which has been applied to random permutations as well as to runs and patterns, is extended to compute the distribution of the conditional discrete scan statistic, defined from a sequence of Bernoulli trials. It is shown that the distribution of the continuous scan statistic induced by a Poisson process defined on (0, 1] is a limiting distribution of weighted distributions of conditional discrete scan statistics. Comparisons of rates of convergence as well as numerical comparisons of various bounds and approximations are provided to illustrate the theoretical results.

We study the bijection between binary Galton-Watson trees in continuous time and their exploration process, both in the subcritical and in the supercritical cases. We then take the limit over renormalized quantities, as the size of the population tends to ∞. We thus deduce Delmas' generalization of the second Ray-Knight theorem.

We consider a system of independent branching random walks on R which start from a Poisson point process with intensity of the form eλ(du) = e-λudu, where λ ∈ R is chosen in such a way that the overall intensity of particles is preserved. Denote by χ the cluster distribution, and let φ be the log-Laplace transform of the intensity of χ. If λφ'(λ) > 0, we show that the system is persistent, meaning that the point process formed by the particles in the nth generation converges as n → ∞ to a non-trivial point process Πeλχ with intensity eλ. If λφ'(λ) < 0 then the branching population suffers local extinction, meaning that the limiting point process is empty. We characterize point processes on R which are cluster invariant with respect to the cluster distribution χ as mixtures of the point processes Πceλχ over c > 0 and λ ∈ Kst, where Kst = {λ ∈ R: φ(λ) = 0, λφ'(λ) > 0}.

The theory of L2-spectral gaps for reversible Markov chains has been studied by many authors. In this paper we consider positive recurrent general state space Markov chains with stationary transition probabilities. Replacing the assumption of reversibility with a weaker assumption, we still obtain a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the spectral gap property of the associated Markov operator in terms of the isoperimetric constant. We show that this result can be applied to a large class of Markov chains, including those that are related to positive recurrent finite-range random walks on Z.

Juggler's exclusion process describes a system of particles on the positive integers where particles drift down to zero at unit speed. After a particle hits zero, it jumps into a randomly chosen unoccupied site. We model the system as a set-valued Markov process and show that the process is ergodic if the family of jump height distributions is uniformly integrable. In a special case where the particles jump according to a set-avoiding memoryless distribution, the process reaches its equilibrium in finite nonrandom time, and the equilibrium distribution can be represented as a Gibbs measure conforming to a linear gravitational potential.

In this paper, a moderate deviation theorem for one-dimensional stable random walks in random scenery is proved. The proof relies on the analysis of maximum local times of stable random walks, and the comparison of moments between random walks in random scenery and self-intersection local times of the underlying random walks.

The Markovian arrival process generalizes the Poisson process by allowing for dependent and nonexponential interarrival times. We study the autocorrelation function of the two-state Markovian arrival process. Our findings show that the correlation structure of such a process has a very specific pattern, namely, it always converges geometrically to zero. Moreover, the signs of the autocorrelation coefficients are either constant or alternating.