This paper considers the family of invariant measures of Markovian mean-field interacting particle systems on a countably infinite state space and studies its large deviation asymptotics. The Freidlin–Wentzell quasipotential is the usual candidate rate function for the sequence of invariant measures indexed by the number of particles. The paper provides two counterexamples where the quasipotential is not the rate function. The quasipotential arises from finite-horizon considerations. However, there are certain barriers that cannot be surmounted easily in any finite time horizon, but these barriers can be crossed in the stationary regime. Consequently, the quasipotential is infinite at some points where the rate function is finite. After highlighting this phenomenon, the paper studies some sufficient conditions on a class of interacting particle systems under which one can continue to assert that the Freidlin–Wentzell quasipotential is indeed the rate function.

The term moderate deviations is often used in the literature to mean a class of large deviation principles that, in some sense, fills the gap between a convergence in probability of some random variables to a constant, and a weak convergence to a centered Gaussian distribution (when such random variables are properly centered and rescaled). We talk about noncentral moderate deviations when the weak convergence is towards a non-Gaussian distribution. In this paper we prove a noncentral moderate deviation result for the bivariate sequence of sums and maxima of independent and identically distributed random variables bounded from above. We also prove a result where the random variables are not bounded from above, and the maxima are suitably normalized. Finally, we prove a moderate deviation result for sums of partial minima of independent and identically distributed exponential random variables.

The goal of this paper is to go further in the analysis of the behavior of the number of descents in a random permutation. Via two different approaches relying on a suitable martingale decomposition or on the Irwin–Hall distribution, we prove that the number of descents satisfies a sharp large-deviation principle. A very precise concentration inequality involving the rate function in the large-deviation principle is also provided.

We consider the simple random walk on the d-dimensional lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ ($d \geq 1$), traveling in potentials which are Bernoulli-distributed. The so-called Lyapunov exponent describes the cost of traveling for the simple random walk in the potential, and it is known that the Lyapunov exponent is strictly monotone in the parameter of the Bernoulli distribution. Hence the aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the potential on the Lyapunov exponent more precisely, and we derive some Lipschitz-type estimates for the difference between the Lyapunov exponents.

We study the large-volume asymptotics of the sum of power-weighted edge lengths $\sum_{e \in E}|e|^\alpha$ in Poisson-based spatial random networks. In the regime $\alpha > d$, we provide a set of sufficient conditions under which the upper-large-deviation asymptotics are characterized by a condensation phenomenon, meaning that the excess is caused by a negligible portion of Poisson points. Moreover, the rate function can be expressed through a concrete optimization problem. This framework encompasses in particular directed, bidirected, and undirected variants of the k-nearest-neighbor graph, as well as suitable $\beta$-skeletons.

Large deviations of the largest and smallest eigenvalues of $\mathbf{X}\mathbf{X}^\top/n$ are studied in this note, where $\mathbf{X}_{p\times n}$ is a $p\times n$ random matrix with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) sub-Gaussian entries. The assumption imposed on the dimension size p and the sample size n is $p=p(n)\rightarrow\infty$ with $p(n)={\mathrm{o}}(n)$. This study generalizes one result obtained in [3].

We consider a class of processes describing a population consisting of k types of individuals. The process is almost surely absorbed at the origin within finite time, and we study the expected time taken for such extinction to occur. We derive simple and precise asymptotic estimates for this expected persistence time, starting either from a single individual or from a quasi-equilibrium state, in the limit as a system size parameter N tends to infinity. Our process need not be a Markov process on $ {\mathbb Z}_+^k$; we allow the possibility that individuals’ lifetimes may follow more general distributions than the exponential distribution.

In this work the $\ell_q$ -norms of points chosen uniformly at random in a centered regular simplex in high dimensions are studied. Berry–Esseen bounds in the regime $1\leq q < \infty$ are derived and complemented by a non-central limit theorem together with moderate and large deviations in the case where $q=\infty$ . An application to the intersection volume of a regular simplex with an $\ell_p^n$ -ball is also carried out.

Let $(X_k)_{k\geq 0}$ be a stationary and ergodic process with joint distribution $\mu $ , where the random variables $X_k$ take values in a finite set $\mathcal {A}$ . Let $R_n$ be the first time this process repeats its first n symbols of output. It is well known that $({1}/{n})\log R_n$ converges almost surely to the entropy of the process. Refined properties of $R_n$ (large deviations, multifractality, etc) are encoded in the return-time $L^q$ -spectrum defined as

provided the limit exists. We consider the case where $(X_k)_{k\geq 0}$ is distributed according to the equilibrium state of a potential with summable variation, and we prove that

where $P((1-q)\varphi )$ is the topological pressure of $(1-q)\varphi $ , the supremum is taken over all shift-invariant measures, and $q_\varphi ^*$ is the unique solution of $P((1-q)\varphi ) =\sup _\eta \int \varphi \,d\eta $ . Unexpectedly, this spectrum does not coincide with the $L^q$ -spectrum of $\mu _\varphi $ , which is $P((1-q)\varphi )$ , and it does not coincide with the waiting-time $L^q$ -spectrum in general. In fact, the return-time $L^q$ -spectrum coincides with the waiting-time $L^q$ -spectrum if and only if the equilibrium state of $\varphi $ is the measure of maximal entropy. As a by-product, we also improve the large deviation asymptotics of $({1}/{n})\log R_n$ .

Asymptotics deviation probabilities of the sum $S_n=X_1+\dots+X_n$ of independent and identically distributed real-valued random variables have been extensively investigated, in particular when $X_1$ is not exponentially integrable. For instance, Nagaev (1969a, 1969b) formulated exact asymptotics results for $\mathbb{P}(S_n>x_n)$ with $x_n\to \infty$ when $X_1$ has a semiexponential distribution. In the same setting, Brosset et al. (2020) derived deviation results at logarithmic scale with shorter proofs relying on classical tools of large-deviation theory and making the rate function at the transition explicit. In this paper we exhibit the same asymptotic behavior for triangular arrays of semiexponentially distributed random variables.

Let $\mathbf{X}$ be a $p\times n$ random matrix whose entries are independent and identically distributed real random variables with zero mean and unit variance. We study the limiting behaviors of the 2-normal condition number k(p,n) of $\mathbf{X}$ in terms of large deviations for large n, with p being fixed or $p=p(n)\rightarrow\infty$ with $p(n)=o(n)$ . We propose two main ingredients: (i) to relate the large-deviation probabilities of k(p,n) to those involving n independent and identically distributed random variables, which enables us to consider a quite general distribution of the entries (namely the sub-Gaussian distribution), and (ii) to control, for standard normal entries, the upper tail of k(p,n) using the upper tails of ratios of two independent $\chi^2$ random variables, which enables us to establish an application in statistical inference.

The logistic birth and death process is perhaps the simplest stochastic population model that has both density-dependent reproduction and a phase transition, and a lot can be learned about the process by studying its extinction time, $\tau_n$ , as a function of system size n. A number of existing results describe the scaling of $\tau_n$ as $n\to\infty$ for various choices of reproductive rate $r_n$ and initial population $X_n(0)$ as a function of n. We collect and complete this picture, obtaining a complete classification of all sequences $(r_n)$ and $(X_n(0))$ for which there exist rescaling parameters $(s_n)$ and $(t_n)$ such that $(\tau_n-t_n)/s_n$ converges in distribution as $n\to\infty$ , and identifying the limits in each case.

Coupling-from-the-past (CFTP) methods have been used to generate perfect samples from finite Gibbs hard-sphere models, an important class of spatial point processes consisting of a set of spheres with the centers on a bounded region that are distributed as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) conditioned so that spheres do not overlap with each other. We propose an alternative importance-sampling-based rejection methodology for the perfect sampling of these models. We analyze the asymptotic expected running time complexity of the proposed method when the intensity of the reference PPP increases to infinity while the (expected) sphere radius decreases to zero at varying rates. We further compare the performance of the proposed method analytically and numerically with that of a naive rejection algorithm and of popular dominated CFTP algorithms. Our analysis relies upon identifying large deviations decay rates of the non-overlapping probability of spheres whose centers are distributed as a homogeneous PPP.

We establish a pathwise large deviation principle for affine stochastic volatility models introduced by Keller-Ressel (2011), and present an application to variance reduction for Monte Carlo computation of prices of path-dependent options in these models, extending the method developed by Genin and Tankov (2020) for exponential Lévy models. To this end, we apply an exponentially affine change of measure and use Varadhan’s lemma, in the fashion of Guasoni and Robertson (2008) and Robertson (2010), to approximate the problem of finding the measure that minimizes the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator. We test the method on the Heston model with and without jumps to demonstrate its numerical efficiency.