We study, under mild conditions, the weak approximation constructed from a standard Poisson process for a class of Gaussian processes, and establish its sample path moderate deviations. The techniques consist of a good asymptotic exponential approximation in moderate deviations, the Besov–Lèvy modulus embedding, and an exponential martingale technique. Moreover, our results are applied to the weak approximations associated with the moving average of Brownian motion, fractional Brownian motion, and an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process.

Two classical stochastic processes are considered, the Ehrenfest process, introduced in 1907 in the kinetic theory of gases to describe the heat exchange between two bodies, and the Engset process, one of the early (1918) stochastic models of communication networks. In this paper we investigate the asymptotic behavior of the distributions of hitting times of these two processes when the number of particles/sources goes to infinity. Results concerning the hitting times of boundaries in particular are obtained. We rely on martingale methods; a key ingredient is an important family of simple nonnegative martingales, an analogue, for the Ehrenfest process, of the exponential martingales used in the study of random walks or of Brownian motion.

In this paper, we consider a Markov-modulated risk model (also called Markovian regime switching insurance risk model). Follow Asmussen (2000, 2003), by using the theory of Markov additive process, an exponential martingale is constructed and Lundberg-type upper bounds for the joint distribution of surplus immediately before and at ruin are obtained. As a natural corollary, bounds for the distribution of the deficit at ruin are obtained. We also present some numerical results to illustrate the tightness of the bound obtained in this paper.