The point process of vertices of an iteration infinitely divisible or, more specifically, of an iteration stable random tessellation in the Euclidean plane is considered. We explicitly determine its covariance measure and its pair-correlation function, as well as the cross-covariance measure and the cross-correlation function of the vertex point process and the random length measure in the general nonstationary regime. We also give special formulae in the stationary and isotropic setting. Exact formulae are given for vertex count variances in compact and convex sampling windows, and asymptotic relations are derived. Our results are then compared with those for a Poisson line tessellation having the same length density parameter. Moreover, a functional central limit theorem for the joint process of suitably rescaled total edge counts and edge lengths is established with the process (ξ, tξ), t > 0, arising in the limit, where ξ is a centered Gaussian variable with explicitly known variance.

We consider spatial stochastic models, which can be applied to, e.g. telecommunication networks with two hierarchy levels. In particular, we consider Cox processes XL and XH concentrated on the edge set T(1) of a random tessellation T, where the points XL,n and XH,n of XL and XH can describe the locations of low-level and high-level network components, respectively, and T(1) the underlying infrastructure of the network, such as road systems, railways, etc. Furthermore, each point XL,n of XL is marked with the shortest path along the edges of T to the nearest (in the Euclidean sense) point of XH. We investigate the typical shortest path length C* of the resulting marked point process, which is an important characteristic in, e.g. performance analysis and planning of telecommunication networks. In particular, we show that the distribution of C* converges to simple parametric limit distributions if a scaling factor κ converges to 0 or ∞. This can be used to approximate the density of C* by analytical formulae for a wide range of κ.

This paper deals with continuous-time Markov decision processes in Polish spaces, under the discounted and average cost criteria. All underlying Markov processes are determined by given transition rates which are allowed to be unbounded, and the costs are assumed to be bounded below. By introducing an occupation measure of a randomized Markov policy and analyzing properties of occupation measures, we first show that the family of all randomized stationary policies is ‘sufficient’ within the class of all randomized Markov policies. Then, under the semicontinuity and compactness conditions, we prove the existence of a discounted cost optimal stationary policy by providing a value iteration technique. Moreover, by developing a new average cost, minimum nonnegative solution method, we prove the existence of an average cost optimal stationary policy under some reasonably mild conditions. Finally, we use some examples to illustrate applications of our results. Except that the costs are assumed to be bounded below, the conditions for the existence of discounted cost (or average cost) optimal policies are much weaker than those in the previous literature, and the minimum nonnegative solution approach is new.

In this paper we generalize a bounded Markov process, described by Stoyanov and Pacheco-González for a class of transition probability functions. A recursive integral equation for the probability density of these bounded Markov processes is derived and the stationary probability density is obtained by solving an equivalent differential equation. Examples of stationary densities for different transition probability functions are given and an application for designing a robotic coverage algorithm with specific emphasis on particular regions is discussed.

In this paper we consider a generalized coupon collection problem in which a customer repeatedly buys a random number of distinct coupons in order to gather a large number n of available coupons. We address the following question: How many different coupons are collected after k = kn draws, as n → ∞? We identify three phases of kn: the sublinear, the linear, and the superlinear. In the growing sublinear phase we see o(n) different coupons, and, with true randomness in the number of purchases, under the appropriate centering and scaling, a Gaussian distribution is obtained across the entire phase. However, if the number of purchases is fixed, a degeneracy arises and normality holds only at the higher end of this phase. If the number of purchases have a fixed range, the small number of different coupons collected in the sublinear phase is upgraded to a number in need of centering and scaling to become normally distributed in the linear phase with a different normal distribution of the type that appears in the usual central limit theorems. The Gaussian results are obtained via martingale theory. We say a few words in passing about the high probability of collecting nearly all the coupons in the superlinear phase. It is our aim to present the results in a way that explores the critical transition at the ‘seam line’ between different Gaussian phases, and between these phases and other nonnormal phases.

The distributions that result from zero-truncating mixed Poisson (ZTMP) distributions and those obtained from mixing zero-truncated Poisson (MZTP) distributions are characterised based on their probability generating functions. One consequence is that every ZTMP distribution is an MZTP distribution, but not vice versa. These characterisations also indicate that the size-biased version of a Poisson mixture and, under certain regularity conditions, the shifted version of a Poisson mixture are neither ZTMP distributions nor MZTP distributions.

The aim of this paper is to analyze a class of random processes which models the motion of a particle on the real line with random velocity and subject to the action of friction. The speed randomly changes when a Poissonian event occurs. We study the characteristic and moment generating functions of the position reached by the particle at time t > 0. We are able to derive the explicit probability distributions in a few cases. The moments are also widely analyzed. For the random motions having an explicit density law, further interesting probabilistic interpretations emerge if we consider randomly varying time. Essentially, we consider two different types of random time, namely Bessel and gamma times, which contain, as particular cases, some important probability distributions (e.g. Gaussian, exponential). For the random processes built by means of these compositions, we derive the probability distributions for a fixed number of Poisson events. Some remarks on possible extensions to random motions in higher spaces are proposed. We focus our attention on the persistent planar random motion.

In this paper we consider the stochastic analysis of information ranking algorithms of large interconnected data sets, e.g. Google's PageRank algorithm for ranking pages on the World Wide Web. The stochastic formulation of the problem results in an equation of the form where N, Q, {Ri}i≥1, and {C, Ci}i≥1 are independent nonnegative random variables, the {C, Ci}i≥1 are identically distributed, and the {Ri}i≥1 are independent copies of stands for equality in distribution. We study the asymptotic properties of the distribution of R that, in the context of PageRank, represents the frequencies of highly ranked pages. The preceding equation is interesting in its own right since it belongs to a more general class of weighted branching processes that have been found to be useful in the analysis of many other algorithms. Our first main result shows that if ENE[Cα] = 1, α > 0, and Q, N satisfy additional moment conditions, then R has a power law distribution of index α. This result is obtained using a new approach based on an extension of Goldie's (1991) implicit renewal theorem. Furthermore, when N is regularly varying of index α > 1, ENE[Cα] < 1, and Q, C have higher moments than α, then the distributions of R and N are tail equivalent. The latter result is derived via a novel sample path large deviation method for recursive random sums. Similarly, we characterize the situation when the distribution of R is determined by the tail of Q. The preceding approaches may be of independent interest, as they can be used for analyzing other functionals on trees. We also briefly discuss the engineering implications of our results.

Melamed's theorem states that, for a Jackson queueing network, the equilibrium flow along a link follows a Poisson distribution if and only if no customers can travel along the link more than once. Barbour and Brown (1996) considered the Poisson approximate version of Melamed's theorem by allowing the customers a small probability p of travelling along the link more than once. In this note, we prove that the customer flow process is a Poisson cluster process and then establish a general approximate version of Melamed's theorem that accommodates all possible cases of 0 ≤ p < 1.

The numerical analysis of quasi-birth-and-death processes rests on the resolution of a matrix-quadratic equation for which efficient algorithms are known when the matrices have finite order, that is, when the number of phases is finite. In this paper we consider the case of infinitely many phases from the point of view of theoretical convergence of truncation and augmentation schemes, and we develop four different methods. Two methods rely on forced transitions to the boundary. In one of these methods, the transitions occur as a result of the truncation itself, while in the other method, they are artificially introduced so that the augmentation may be chosen to be as natural as possible. Two other methods rely on forced transitions within the same level. We conclude with a brief numerical illustration.

Consider a continuous-time renewal risk model with a constant force of interest. We assume that claim sizes and interarrival times correspondingly form a sequence of independent and identically distributed random pairs and that each pair obeys a dependence structure described via the conditional tail probability of a claim size given the interarrival time before the claim. We focus on determining the impact of this dependence structure on the asymptotic tail probability of discounted aggregate claims. Assuming that the claim size distribution is subexponential, we derive an exact locally uniform asymptotic formula, which quantitatively captures the impact of the dependence structure. When the claim size distribution is extended regularly varying tailed, we show that this asymptotic formula is globally uniform.

We describe the processes obtained by time reversal of a class of stationary jump diffusion processes that model the dynamics of genetic variation in populations subject to repeated bottlenecks. Assuming that only one lineage survives each bottleneck, the forward process is a diffusion on [0,1] that jumps to the boundary before diffusing back into the interior. We show that the behavior of the time-reversed process depends on whether the boundaries are accessible to the diffusive motion of the forward process. If a boundary point is inaccessible to the forward diffusion then time reversal leads to a jump diffusion that jumps immediately into the interior whenever it arrives at that point. If, instead, a boundary point is accessible then the jumps off of that point are governed by a weighted local time of the time-reversed process.

We propose a model for the presence/absence of a population in a collection of habitat patches. This model assumes that colonisation and extinction of the patches occur as distinct phases. Importantly, the local extinction probabilities are allowed to vary between patches. This permits an investigation of the effect of habitat degradation on the persistence of the population. The limiting behaviour of the model is examined as the number of habitat patches increases to ∞. This is done in the case where the number of patches and the initial number of occupied patches increase at the same rate, and for the case where the initial number of occupied patches remains fixed.

We investigate the final size distribution of the SIR (susceptible-infected-recovered) epidemic model in the critical regime. Using the integral representation of Martin-Löf (1998) for the hitting time of a Brownian motion with parabolic drift, we derive asymptotic expressions for the final size distribution that capture the effect of the initial number of infectives and the closeness of the reproduction number to zero. These asymptotics shed light on the bimodularity of the limiting density of the final size observed in Martin-Löf (1998). We also discuss the connection to the largest component in the Erdős-Rényi random graph, and, using this connection, find an integral expression of the Laplace transform of the normalized Brownian excursion area in terms of Airy functions.