This paper is concerned with the correlation structure of a stationary discrete time-series with long memory or long-range dependence. Given a sequence of bounded variation, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a function generated from the sequence to be a proper correlation function. These conditions are applied to derive various slowly decaying correlation models. To obtain correlation models with short-range dependence from an absolutely summable sequence, a simple method is introduced.

In this paper we identify a monotonicity in all countable-state-space reversible Markov chains and examine several consequences of this structure. In particular, we show that the return times to every state in a reversible chain have a decreasing hazard rate on the subsequence of even times. This monotonicity is used to develop geometric convergence rate bounds for time-reversible Markov chains. Results relating the radius of convergence of the probability generating function of first return times to the chain's rate of convergence are presented. An effort is made to keep the exposition rudimentary.

In this note we introduce recurring-with-carry sequences which generalize add-with-carry and subtract-with-borrow sequences introduced in [1], and describe periods of admissible recurring-with-carry sequences which include add-with-carry and subtract-with-borrow sequences with a few exceptions.

In this paper we consider the stationary PH/M/c queue with deterministic impatience times (PH/M/c+D). We show that the probability density function of the virtual waiting time takes the form of a matrix exponential whose exponent is given explicitly by system parameters.

We propose a generalized Cramér–Lundberg model of the risk theory of non-life insurance and study its ruin probability. Our model is an extension of that of Dubey (1977) to the case of multiple insureds, where the counting process is a mixed Poisson process and the continuously varying premium rate is determined by a Bayesian rule on the number of claims. We use two proofs to show that, for each fixed value of the safety loading, the ruin probability is the same as that of the classical Cramér–Lundberg model and does not depend on either the distribution of the mixing variable of the driving mixed Poisson process or the number of claim contracts.

In this article we investigate a class of superprocess with cut-off branching, studying the long-time behavior of the occupation time process. Persistence of the process holds in all dimensions. Central-limit-type theorems are obtained, and the scales are dimension dependent. The Gaussian limit holds only when d ≤ 4. In dimension one, a full large deviation principle is established and the rate function is identified explicitly. Our result shows that the super-Brownian motion with cut-off branching in dimension one has many features that are similar to super-Brownian motion in dimension three.

In this paper we study the assignment of packets to M parallel heterogeneous servers with no buffers. The controller does not have knowledge on the state of the servers and bases all decisions on the number of time slots ago that packets have been sent to the different servers. The objective of the controller is to minimize the expected average cost. We consider a general stationary arrival process, with no independence assumptions. We show that the problem can be transformed into a Markov Decision Process (MDP). We further show under quite general conditions on cost functions that only a finite number of states have to be considered in this MDP, which then implies the optimality of periodic policies. For the case of two servers we obtain a more detailed structure of the cost and optimal policies. In particular we show that the average cost function is multimodular, and we obtain expressions for the cost for MMPP and MAP processes. Finally we present an application to optimal robot scheduling for Web search engines.

An asymptotic distribution is given for the partial sums of a stationary time-series with long-range dependence. The law of large numbers for the sample covariance of the series is also derived. The results differ from those given elsewhere in relaxing the assumption of the independence of the innovations of the series.

Following a long-standing suggestion by Gilbert and Mosteller, we derive an explicit formula for the asymptotic winning rate in the full-information best-choice problem.

Equivalence of rates of convergence in the central limit theorem for the vector of maximum sums and the corresponding first-passage variables is established. A similar result for the vector of partial sums and the corresponding renewal variables is also given. The results extend to several dimensions the bivariate results of Ahmad (1981).

Time-reversal arguments can be used to re-derive (and slightly generalize) previous results for sojourn-time distributions in product-form queuing networks.

A multitype branching process is presented in the framework of marked trees and its structure is studied by applying the strong branching property. In particular, the Markov property and the expression for the generator are derived for the process whose components are the numbers of particles of each type. The filtering of the whole population, observing the number of particles of a given type, is discussed. Weak uniqueness for the filtering equation and a recursive structure for the linearized filtering equation are proved under a suitable assumption on the reproduction law.

The forward equations for the death process in ℕ2 with Q-matrix determined by q(i, j; i − 1, j) = αij, i ≧ 1, q(i, j; i, j − 1) = μj, j ≧ 1 are solved by giving a special interpretation to this Q-matrix.

An extension of a convergence theorem for sequences of Markov chains is derived. For every positive integer N let (X N (r))r be a Markov chain with the same finite state space S and transition matrix ΠN =I+d N B N , where I is the unit matrix, Q a generator matrix, (B N )N a sequence of matrices, limN℩∞ c N = limN→∞d N =0 and limN→∞ c N ∕d N =0. Suppose that the limits P≔limm→∞(I+d N Q)m and G≔limN→∞ P B N P exist. If the sequence of initial distributions P X N (0) converges weakly to some probability measure μ, then the finite-dimensional distributions of (X N ([t∕c N ))t≥0 converge to those of the Markov process (X t )t≥0 with initial distribution μ, transition matrix PetG and limN→∞(I+d N Q+c N B N )[t∕c N]

We study the distribution of the negative Wiener–Hopf factor for a class of two-sided jump Lévy processes whose positive jumps have a rational Laplace transform. The positive Wiener–Hopf factor for this class of processes was studied by Lewis and Mordecki (2008). Here we obtain a formula for the Laplace transform of the negative Wiener–Hopf factor, as well as an explicit expression for its probability density in terms of sums of convolutions of known functions. Under additional regularity conditions on the Lévy measure of the studied processes, we also provide asymptotic results as $u\to-\infty$ for the distribution function F(u) of the negative Wiener–Hopf factor. We illustrate our results in some particular examples.

A weighted Markov chain technique is used to determine the general distribution of the number of tie positions in a two candidate ballot. This may be interpreted as the distribution of the number of returns to the origin in an asymmetric random walk, when the particle at each step moves μ units in the positive direction and γ units in the negative direction, given the total number of positive steps and the number of negative steps. Explicit results are obtained when γ = 1, whereas the case of μ and γ ≠ 1 is solved in the form of a generating function.

In clinical trials with two treatment arms, Efron's biased coin design, Efron (1971), sequentially assigns a patient to the underrepresented arm with probability p > ½. Under this design the proportion of patients in any arm converges to ½, and the convergence rate is n-1, as opposed to n-½ under some other popular designs. The generalization of Efron's design to K ≥ 2 arms and an unequal target allocation ratio (q1, . . ., qK) can be found in some papers, most of which determine the allocation probabilities ps in a heuristic way. Nonetheless, it has been noted that by using inappropriate ps, the proportion of patients in the K arms never converges to the target ratio. We develop a general theory to answer the question of what allocation probabilities ensure that the realized proportions under a generalized design still converge to the target ratio (q1, . . ., qK) with rate n-1.

The paper is concerned with filtering the cardinality of a branching process observing the cardinality of a subpopulation. In this model, both the processes, state and observation are pure jump processes and may have common jump times. Preliminary properties are studied in the tree framework. A recursive structure for the filtering equation is proved in the supercritical case.

Let {X(n): n = 0, 1, 2, …} be a Markov chain with state space {0, 1, 2, …, N} and transition probability matrix P = (pij).