In this paper excursions of a stationary diffusion in stationary state are studied. In particular, we compute the joint distribution of the occupation times $I^{(+)}_t$ and $I^{(-)}_t$ above and below, respectively, the observed level at time $t$ during an excursion. We consider also the starting time $g_t$ and the ending time $d_t$ of the excursion (straddling $t$) and discuss their relations to the Levy measure of the inverse local time. It is seen that the pairs $(I^{(+)}_t, I^{(-)}_t)$ and $(t-g_t, d_t-t)$ are identically distributed. Moreover, conditionally on $I^{(+)}_t + I^{(-)}_t =v$, the variables $I^{(+)}_t$ and $I^{(-)}_t$ are uniformly distributed on $(0,v)$.
Using the theory of the Palm measures, we derive an analoguous result for excursion bridges.
We study properties of occupation times by Brownian excursions and Brownian loops in two-dimensional domains. This allows for instance to interpret some Gaussian fields, such as the Gaussian Free Fields as (properly normalized) fluctuations of the total occupation time of a Poisson cloud of Brownian excursions when the intensity of the cloud goes to infinity.
Smoothness and asymptotic behaviors are studied for the densities of the law of the occupation time on the positive line for Bessel bridges and the normalized excursion of strictly stable processes. The key role is played by these properties for functions defined by Riemann--Liouville fractional integrals.
The paper considers excited random walks (ERWs) on integers in i.i.d. environments with a bounded number of excitations per site. The emphasis is primarily on the critical case for the transition between recurrence and transience which occurs when the total expected drift $δ$ at each site of the environment is equal to 1 in absolute value. Several crucial estimates for ERWs fail in the critical case and require a separate treatment. The main results discuss the depth and duration of excursions from the origin for $|δ|=1$ as well as occupation times of negative and positive semi-axes and scalin…
We give an overview of the recent asymptotic results on the geometry of excursion sets of stationary random fields. Namely, we cover a number of limit theorems of central type for the volume of excursions of stationary (quasi--, positively or negatively) associated random fields with stochastically continuous realizations for a fixed excursion level. This class includes in particular Gaussian, Poisson shot noise, certain infinitely divisible, $α$--stable and max--stable random fields satisfying some extra dependence conditions. Functional limit theorems (with the excursion level being an argum…
We exhibit, in the form of some identities in law, some connections between tilted stable subordinators, time-changed by independent Gamma processes and the occupation times of Bessel spiders, or their bridges. These identities in law are then explained thanks to excursion theory.
Stochastic processes time-changed by an inverse subordinator have been suggested as a way to model the price of assets in illiquid markets, where the jumps of the subordinator correspond to periods of time where one is unable to sell an asset. We develop an excursion theory for time-changed reflected Brownian motion and use this to express the price of certain European options with Parisian barrier condition in terms of solutions of a time-fractional PDE. We provide a general description of the occupation measures of time-changed processes and use this to prove a Ray-Knight theorem for the occ…
The integrated Brownian motion is sometimes known as the Langevin process. Lachal studied several excursion laws induced by the latter. Here we follow a different point of view developed by Pitman for general stationary processes. We first construct a stationary Langevin process and then determine explicitly its stationary excursion measure. This is then used to provide new descriptions of Ito's excursion measure of the Langevin process reflected at a completely inelastic boundary, which has been introduced recently by Bertoin.
Given that a stationary Gaussian process is above a high threshold, the length of time it spends before going below that threshold is studied. The asymptotic order is determined by the smoothness of the sample paths, which in turn is a function of the tails of the spectral measure. Two disjoint regimes are studied - one in which the second spectral moment is finite and the other in which the tails of the spectral measure are regularly varying and the second moment is infinite.
We present a number of important identities related to the excursion theory of linear diffusions. In particular, excursions straddling an independent exponential time are studied in detail. Letting the parameter of the exponential time tend to zero it is seen that these results connect to the corresponding results for excursions of stationary diffusions (in stationary state). We characterize also the laws of the diffusion prior and posterior to the last zero before the exponential time. It is proved using Krein's representations that, e.g., the law of the length of the excursion straddling an …
This paper considers the asymptotic behaviour of volumes of excursion sets of subordinated Gaussian random fields with (possibly) infinite variance. Actually, we consider integral functionals of such fields and obtain their limiting distribution using the Hermite expansion of the integrand. We consider the general non-stationary Gaussian random fields, including stationary and anisotropic special cases. The limiting random variables in our limit theorems have the form of multiple Wiener-Itô integrals. We illustrate most results with corresponding examples.
In this paper, we use the concept of excursion sets for the extrapolation of stationary random fields. Doing so, we define excursion sets for the field and its linear predictor, and then minimize the expected volume of the symmetric difference of these sets under the condition that the univariate distributions of the predictor and of the field itself coincide. We illustrate the new approach on Gaussian random fields.
This paper studies the excursion set of a real stationary isotropic Gaussian random field above a fixed level. We show that the standardized Lipschitz-Killing curvatures of the intersection of the excursion set with a window converges in distribution to a normal distribution as the window grows to the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. Moreover a lower bound for the asymptotic variance is shown.
The present work investigates two properties of level crossings of a stationary Gaussian process $X(t)$ with autocorrelation function $R_X(τ)$. We show firstly that if $R_X(τ)$ admits finite second and fourth derivatives at the origin, the length of up-excursions above a large negative level $-γ$ is asymptotically exponential as $-γ\to -\infty$. Secondly, assuming that $R_X(τ)$ admits a finite second derivative at the origin and some defined properties, we derive the mean number of crossings as well as the length of successive excursions above two subsequent large levels. The asymptotic result…
This paper extends previous work by the authors. We consider the local time process of a strong Markov process, add negative drift, and reflect it à la Skorokhod. The resulting process is used to model a fluid queue. We derive an expression for the joint law of the duration of an excursion, the maximum value of the process on it, and the time distance between successive excursions. We work with a properly constructed stationary version of the process. Examples are also given in the paper.
Let $X=\{X(t),t\in {\mathbb{R}}^N\}$ be a centered Gaussian random field with stationary increments and $X(0)=0$. For any compact rectangle $T\subset {\mathbb{R}}^N$ and $u\in {\mathbb{R}}$, denote by $A_u=\{t\in T:X(t)\geq u\}$ the excursion set. Under $X(\cdot)\in C^2({\mathbb{R}}^N)$ and certain regularity conditions, the mean Euler characteristic of $A_u$, denoted by ${\mathbb{E}}\{φ(A_u)\}$, is derived. By applying the Rice method, it is shown that, as $u\to\infty$, the excursion probability ${\mathbb{P}}\{\sup_{t\in T}X(t)\geq u\}$ can be approximated by ${\mathbb{E}}\{φ(A_u)\}$ such tha…
In a previous paper, we established strong existence and uniqueness for a reflected diffusion $(X,S)$ with values in $\bar D\times \mathbbm{R}^p$, solving the following pair of stochastic differential equations: $$ dX_t = σ(X_t)dB_t + \vecγ(X_t,S_t)dL_t, $$ $$ dS_t = [\vec{g}(X_t) - S_t ] dL_t. $$ Here $L_t$ is the boundary local time of $X_t$, and $\vecγ$ points uniformly into the domain $D$. The process $(X,S)$ is called spinning Brownian motion (sBm). In this article, we prove uniqueness of the stationary distribution of spinning Brownian motion by studying excursions away from the boundary…
This work is to popularize the method of computing the distribution of the excursion times for a Gaussian process that involves extended and multivariate Rice's formula. The approach was used in numerical implementations of the high-dimensional integration routine and in earlier work it was shown that the computations are more effective and thus more precise than those based on Rice expansions. The joint distribution of excursion times is related to the distribution of the number of level crossings, a problem that can be attacked via the Rice series expansion, based on the moments of the numbe…
We consider two jointly stationary and ergodic random measures $ξ$ and $η$ on the real line $\mathbb{R}$ with equal intensities. An allocation is an equivariant random mapping from $\mathbb{R}$ to $\mathbb{R}$. We give sufficient and partially necessary conditions for the existence of allocations transporting $ξ$ to $η$. An important ingredient of our approach is to introduce a transport kernel balancing $ξ$ and $η$, provided these random measures are mutually singular. In the second part of the paper, we apply this result to the path decomposition of a two-sided Brownian motion into three ind…
We study a random process with reinforcement, which evolves following the dynamics of a given diffusion process in a bounded domain and is resampled according to its occupation measure when it reaches the boundary. We show that its occupation measure converges to the unique quasi-stationary distribution of the diffusion process absorbed at the boundary of the domain. Our proofs use recent results in the theory of quasi-stationary distributions and stochastic approximation techniques.
The translative intersection formula of integral geometry yields an expression for the mean Euler characteristic of a stationary random closed set intersected with a fixed observation window. We formulate this result in the setting of sets with positive reach and using flag measures which yield curvature measures as marginals. As an application, we consider excursion sets of stationary random fields with $C^{1,1}$ realizations, in particular, stationary Gaussian fields, and obtain results which extend those known from the literature.
The approximation of integral functionals with respect to a stationary Markov process by a Riemann-sum estimator is studied. Stationarity and the functional calculus of the infinitesimal generator of the process are used to get a better understanding of the estimation error and to prove a general error bound. The presented approach admits general integrands and gives a unifying explanation for different rates obtained in the literature. Several examples demonstrate how the general bound can be related to well-known function spaces.
In this paper we study the asymptotic behavior of the normalized weighted empirical occupation measures of a diffusion process on a compact manifold which is killed at a smooth rate and then regenerated at a random location, distributed according to the weighted empirical occupation measure. We show that the weighted occupation measures almost surely comprise an asymptotic pseudo-trajectory for a certain deterministic measure-valued semiflow, after suitably rescaling the time, and that with probability one they converge to the quasi-stationary distribution of the killed diffusion. These result…
In this paper, we consider isotropic and stationary real Gaussian random fields defined on $\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{R}$ and we investigate the asymptotic behavior, as $T\rightarrow +\infty$, of the empirical measure (excursion area) in $\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{R}$ at any threshold, covering both cases when the field exhibits short and long memory, i.e. integrable and non-integrable temporal covariance. It turns out that the limiting distribution is not universal, depending both on the memory parameters and the threshold. In particular, in the long memory case a form of Berry's cancellation…
We determine the large exceedance probabilities and large exceedance paths for the matrix recursive sequence $V_n = M_n V_{n-1} + Q_n, \: n=1,2,\ldots,$ where $\{M_n\}$ is an i.i.d. sequence of $d \times d$ random matrices and $\{ Q_n\}$ is an i.i.d. sequence of random vectors, both with nonnegative entries. Early work on this problem dates to Kesten's (1973) seminal paper, motivated by an application to multi-type branching processes. Other applications arise in financial time series modeling (connected to the study of the GARCH($p,q$) processes) and in physics, and this recursive sequence ha…
We establish limit theorems for re-scaled occupation time fluctuations of a sequence of branching particle systems in $\R^d$ with anisotropic space motion and weakly degenerate splitting ability. In the case of large dimensions, our limit processes lead to a new class of operator-scaling Gaussian random fields with non-stationary increments. In the intermediate and critical dimensions, the limit processes have spatial structures analogous to (but more complicated than) those arising from the critical branching particle system without degeneration considered by Bojdecki et al.{\it Stochastic Pr…
In this short paper, we consider a quadruple $(Ω, Å, θ, μ)$,where $Å$ is a $σ$-algebra of subsets of $Ω$, and $θ$ is a measurable bijection from $Ω$ into itself that preserves the measure $μ$. For each $B \in Å$, we consider the measure $μ_B$ obtained by taking cycles (excursions) of iterates of $θ$ from $B$. We then derive a relation for $μ_B$ that involves the forward and backward hitting times of $B$ by the trajectory $(θ^n ω, n \in \Z)$ at a point $ω\in Ω$. Although classical in appearance, its use in obtaining uniqueness of invariant measures of various stochastic models seems to be new. …
We construct a pair of related diffusions on a space of interval partitions of the unit interval $[0,1]$ that are stationary with the Poisson-Dirichlet laws with parameters (1/2,0) and (1/2,1/2) respectively. These are two particular cases of a general construction of such processes obtained by decorating the jumps of a spectrally positive Lévy process with independent squared Bessel excursions. The processes of ranked interval lengths of our partitions are members of a two parameter family of diffusions introduced by Ethier and Kurtz (1981) and Petrov (2009). The latter diffusions are continu…
The high frequency behaviour for random eigenfunctions of the spherical Laplacian has been recently the object of considerable interest, also because of strong motivations arising from Physics and Cosmology. In this paper, we are concerned with the high frequency behaviour of excursion sets; in particular, we establish a Uniform Central Limit Theorem for the empirical measure, i.e. the proportion of spherical surface where spherical Gaussian eigenfunctions lie below a level $z$. Our proofs borrows some techniques from the literature on stationary long memory processes; in particular, we expand…
We give a pathwise construction of a two-parameter family of purely-atomic-measure-valued diffusions in which ranked masses of atoms are stationary with the Poisson-Dirichlet$(α,θ)$ distributions, for $α\in (0,1)$ and $θ\ge 0$. This resolves a conjecture of Feng and Sun (2010). We build on our previous work on $(α,0)$- and $(α,α)$-interval partition evolutions. Indeed, we first extract a self-similar superprocess from the levels of stable processes whose jumps are decorated with squared Bessel excursions and distinct allelic types. We complete our construction by time-change and normalisation …
We consider a particle system with weights and the scaling limits derived from its occupation time. We let the particles perform independent recurrent Lévy motions and we assume that their initial positions and weights are given by a Poisson point process. In the limit we obtain a number of recently discovered stationary stable self-similar processes recently studied in [SAM1] and [SAM2]. We also observe very different limit processes depending on whether the function, whose occupation time is considered, integrates to zero or not.
We consider the damped nonlinear wave (NLW) equation driven by a spatially regular white noise. Assuming that the noise is non-degenerate in all Fourier modes, we establish a large deviations principle (LDP) for the occupation measures of the trajectories. The lower bound in the LDP is of a local type, which is related to the weakly dissipative nature of the equation and seems to be new in the context of randomly forced PDE's. The proof is based on an extension of methods developed in \cite{JNPS-2012} and \cite{JNPS-2014} in the case of kick forced dissipative PDE's with parabolic regularisati…
We introduce diffusions on a space of interval partitions of the unit interval that are stationary with the Poisson-Dirichlet laws with parameters $(α,0)$ and $(α,α)$. The construction has two steps. The first is a general construction of interval partition processes obtained previously, by decorating the jumps of a Lévy process with independent excursions. Here, we focus on the second step, which requires explicit transition kernels and what we call pseudo-stationarity. This allows us to study processes obtained from the original construction via scaling and time-change. In a sequel paper, we…
We consider particle systems in locally compact Abelian groups with particles moving according to a process with symmetric stationary independent increments and undergoing one and two levels of critical branching. We obtain long time fluctuation limits for the occupation time process of the one-and two-level systems. We give complete results for the case of finite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are Gaussian random fields, and partial results for an example of infinite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are stable random fields. The asymptotics of the occupation …
This paper presents a synthesis on the mathematical work done on level crossings of stationary Gaussian processes, with some extensions. The main results [(factorial) moments, representation into the Wiener Chaos, asymptotic results, rate of convergence, local time and number of crossings] are described, as well as the different approaches [normal comparison method, Rice method, Stein-Chen method, a general $m$-dependent method] used to obtain them; these methods are also very useful in the general context of Gaussian fields. Finally some extensions [time occupation functionals, number of maxi…
The integrated super-Brownian excursion (ISE) is the occupation measure of the spatial component of the head of the Brownian snake with lifetime process the normalized Brownian excursion. It is a random probability measure on $\mathbb{R}$, and it is known to describe the continuum limit of the distribution of labels in various models of random discrete labelled trees. We show that $f_{ISE}$, its (random) density has a.s. a derivative $f'_{ISE}$ which is continuous and $\left(\frac{1}{2}-a\right)$-Hölder for any $a >0$ but for no $a<0$ (proving a conjecture of Bousquet-Mélou and Janson). We con…
We propose two numerical schemes for approximating quasi-stationary distributions (QSD) of finite state Markov chains with absorbing states. Both schemes are described in terms of certain interacting chains in which the interaction is given in terms of the total time occupation measure of all particles in the system and has the impact of reinforcing transitions, in an appropriate fashion, to states where the collection of particles has spent more time. The schemes can be viewed as combining the key features of the two basic simulation-based methods for approximating QSD originating from the wo…
We show that the law of the overall supremum $\bar{X}_t=\sup_{s\le t}X_s$ of a Lévy process $X$ before the deterministic time $t$ is equivalent to the average occupation measure $μ_t(dx)=\int_0^t\p(X_s\in dx)\,ds$, whenever 0 is regular for both open halflines $(-\infty,0)$ and $(0,\infty)$. In this case, $\p(\bar{X}_t\in dx)$ is absolutely continuous for some (and hence for all) $t>0$, if and only if the resolvent measure of $X$ is absolutely continuous. We also study the cases where 0 is not regular for one of the halflines $(-\infty,0)$ or $(0,\infty)$. Then we give absolute continuity crit…
We study a class of dissipative PDE's perturbed by a bounded random kick force. It is assumed that the random force is non-degenerate, so that the Markov process obtained by the restriction of solutions to integer times has a unique stationary measure. The main result of the paper is a large deviation principle for occupation measures of the Markov process in question. The proof is based on Kifer's large deviation criterion, a Lyapunov-Schmidt type reduction, and an abstract result on large-time asymptotic for generalised Markov semigroups.
We consider diffusion-limited annihilating systems with mobile $A$-particles and stationary $B$-particles placed throughout a graph. Mutual annihilation occurs whenever an $A$-particle meets a $B$-particle. Such systems, when ran in discrete time, are also referred to as parking processes. We show for a broad family of graphs and random walk kernels that augmenting either the size or variability of the initial placements of particles increases the total occupation time by $A$-particles of a given subset of the graph. A corollary is that the same phenomenon occurs with the total lifespan of all…
We consider continuous time random interlacements on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d \ge 3$, and characterize the distribution of the corresponding stationary random field of occupation times. When d = 3, we relate this random field to the two-dimensional Gaussian free field pinned at the origin by looking at scaled differences of occupation times of long rods by random interlacements at appropriately tuned levels. In the main asymptotic regime, a scaling factor appears in the limit, which is independent of the free field, and distributed as the time-marginal of a zero-dimensional Bessel process. For arbit…
