This paper considers a body whose funds accumulate according to a Wiener Process that has parameters which can be controlled at any stage. The process is bounded above by a level at which dividends (or savings) are set aside, and it is bounded below by a level at which a ‘rescue’ policy is invoked to avoid insolvency. Taking long-term dividend maximisation as the optimality criterion, first passage times are used to derive a general first order differential equation for the optimal control of the system at any reserves level, and this equation is solved fully for a certain class of problems. Examples are given of insurance and investment applications.

The probability density of binary variables on a lattice with the nearest-neighbor condition is given by the Gibbs Random Field formula. This paper examines some consequences of the result. Approximate formulae for the maximum likelihood estimator of the persistence parameter are derived and discussed, with an example. A comparison is made between two test statistics for independence.

A population process is considered where particles reproduce according to an age-dependent branching process, and are subjected to disasters which occur at the epochs of an independent renewal process. Each particle alive at the time of a disaster, survives it with probability p and the survival of any particle is assumed independent of the survival of any other particle. The asymptotic behavior of the mean of the process is determined and as a consequence, necessary and sufficient conditions are given for extinction.

The bivariate Poisson point process introduced in Cox and Lewis (1972), and there called the bivariate delayed Poisson process, is studied further; the process arises from pairs of delays on the events of a Poisson process. In particular, results are obtained for the stationary initial conditions, the joint distribution of the number of operative delays at an arbitrary time, the asynchronous counting distribution, and two semi-synchronous interval distributions. The joint delay distribution employed allows for dependence and two-sided delays, but the model retains the independence between different pairs of delays.

The conditional inference approach is shown to extend to the general regression problem and to give exact inferences for entirely arbitrary distributions.

In this paper we consider the long term behaviour till absorption of multitype Galton-Watson processes using the theory of quasi-stationary distributions.

Prompted by a rivulet model for the flow of liquid through packed columns we consider a simple random walk on parallel axes moving at different rates. A particle may make one of three transitions at each time instant: to the right or to the left on the axis it was on at the previous time instant, or across to the other axis. Results are obtained for the unrestricted walk, and for the walk with absorbing, or reflecting, end-points.

Let η =Σjδτj be a point process on some space S and let β,β1,β2, … be identically distributed non-negative random variables which are mutually independent and independent of η. We can then form the compound point process ξ = Σjβjδτj which is a random measure on S. The purpose of this paper is to study the limiting behaviour of ξ as . In the particular case when β takes the values 1 and 0 with probabilities p and 1 –p respectively, ξ becomes a p-thinning of η and our theorems contain some classical results by Rényi and others on the thinnings of a fixed process, as well as a characterization by Mecke of the class of subordinated Poisson processes.

Approximate parametric prediction intervals are obtained for an unobserved random variable when the amount of data on which to base the estimation is large. Applications include the construction of approximate confidence intervals in empirical Bayes estimation.

We study in detail the case of first-order regression, but our results can be extended to the general regression in a straightforward manner. An average energy constraint ((1.2) below) is imposed on each signal. In Section 2 we give an optimal linear signalling scheme (definition and proof in Section 4) for this channel. We conjecture that this scheme is optimal among all signalling schemes. Then the capacity C of the channel is (see Section 5) – log b, where b is the unique positive root (in x) of the equation x2 = (1 + g2(1 + |α|x)2)–1. Here a is the regression coefficient, and g2 is the ratio of the average energy per signal to the variance of the noise. An equivalent expression is C = ½log(1 + g2(1 + |α| b)2).

Let be the kth largest among Xn1, …, Xn[nt], where Xni = (Xi – an)/bn, {Xi} is a sequence of independent random variables and bn > 0 and an are norming constants. Suppose that for each converges in distribution. Then all the finite-dimensional laws of converge. The limiting process is represented in terms of a non-homogeneous two-dimensional Poisson process.

The self-exciting point process with exponential exciting function is investigated using the immigration birth representation of the process. The counting distribution is derived explicitly and some simpler interval properties are given. In particular, it is shown that the serial covariances of the interval sequence decrease monotonically to zero.

Let Gn(x) be the distribution function of the maximum of the successive partial sums of independent and identically distributed random variables and G(x) its limiting distribution function. Under conditions, typical for complete exponential convergence, the decay of Gn(x) — G(x) is asymptotically equal to c.H(x)n−3/2γn as n → ∞ where c and γ are known constants and H(x) is a function solely depending on x.

We find expressions for the R–N derivative of the stationary Gaussian process with the particular covariance and mean, respectively, R(t, s) = max(1 – |t – s|, 0) and m(t)= aR(t, D), 0 ≦ D ≦ 1, within the time interval [0, 1]. We use these results, and a lemma on multiple reflections of the Wiener process, to find formulae for the probabilities of first passage time and maxima in [0, 1], and bounds on the former within [– 1, 1]. While previous work dealt extensively with the zero mean process, mean functions, as defined here, appear in signal detection and parameter estimation problems under the hypothesis that a rectangular signal centered at t = D is present in an observed process.

Bartlett and Williams have shown that the hypothesis of the goodness-of-fit of one or more assigned discriminant functions in the case of several groups can be tested using Wilks's A criterion. By factorizing this A criterion suitably, it is also possible to test whether the directions of the given functions are inadequate or whether the number of proposed functions is inadequate. Hotelling's statistic is a competitor of Wilks's A in multivariate analysis; previously its use for this hypothesis and also for the dimensionality and direction aspects of this hypothesis was unknown. The present paper derives the appropriate type statistics for this and also gives their exact null distributions.

By using a cluster representation of the mutually-exciting processes their probability generating functional is derived. This is used to obtain some counting and interval properties of the process. The theoretical results are applied to a numerical example.

Using Akaike's information criterion, we have presented an objective procedure for the determination of the order of an ergodic Markov chain with a finite number of states. The procedure exploits the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood ratio statistics and Kullback and Leibler's mean information for the discrimination between two distributions. Numerical illustrations are given, using data from Bartlett (1966), Good and Gover (1967) and some weather records.

A bivariate point process consisting of an original stationary point process and its random translation is considered. Westcott's method is applied to show that if the original point process is ergodic then the bivariate point process is also ergodic. This result is applied to an identification problem of the displacement distribution. It is shown that if the spectrum of the original process is the real line then the displacement distribution is identifiable from almost every sample realisation of the bivariate process.

The product-limit estimator for a distribution function, appropriate to observations which are variably censored, was introduced by Kaplan and Meier in 1958; it has provided a basis for study of more complex problems by Cox and by others. Its properties in the case of random censoring have been studied by Efron and later writers. The basic properties of the product-limit estimator are here shown to be closely parallel to the properties of the empirical distribution function in the general case of variably and arbitrarily censored observations.

Let X(t) be a continuous time Markov process on the integers such that, if σ is a time at which X makes a jump, X(σ)– X(σ–) is distributed independently of X(σ–), and has finite mean μ and variance. Let q(j) denote the residence time parameter for the state j. If tn denotes the time of the nth jump and Xn ≡ X(tb), it is easy to deduce limit theorems for from those for sums of independent identically distributed random variables. In this paper, it is shown how, for μ > 0 and for suitable q(·), these theorems can be translated into limit theorems for X(t), by using the continuous mapping theorem.