We study the exit problem of solutions of the stochastic differential equation dX(t)=-U'(X(t))dt+epsilon dL(t) from bounded or unbounded intervals which contain the unique asymptotically stable critical point of the deterministic dynamical system dY=-U'(Y) dt. The process L is composed of a standard Brownian motion and a symmetric alpha-stable Levy process. Using probabilistic estimates we show that in the small noise limit epsilon->0, the exit time of X from an interval is an exponentially distributed random variable and determine its expected value. Due to the heavy-tail nature of the alpha-stable component of L, the results differ strongly from the well known case in which the deterministic dynamical system undergoes purely Gaussian perturbations.
A dynamical system driven by non-Gaussian Lévy noises of small intensity is considered. The first exit time of solution orbits from a bounded neighborhood of an attracting equilibrium state is estimated. For a class of non-Gaussian Lévy noises, it is shown that the mean exit time is asymptotically faster than exponential (the well-known Gaussian Brownian noise case) but slower than polynomial (the stable Lévy noise case), in terms of the reciprocal of the small noise intensity.
We use the mean exit time to quantify macroscopic dynamical behaviors of stochastic dynamical systems driven by tempered Lévy fluctuations, which are solutions of nonlocal elliptic equations. Firstly, we construct a new numerical scheme to compute and solve the mean exit time associated with the one dimensional stochastic system. Secondly, we extend the analytical and numerical results to two dimensional case: horizontal-vertical and isotropic case. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the presented schemes with numerical experiments in several examples.
We prove two martingale identities which involve exit times of Levy-driven Ornstein--Uhlenbeck processes. Using these identities we find an explicit formula for the Laplace transform of the exit time under the assumption that positive jumps of the Levy process are exponentially distributed.
We consider a finite dimensional deterministic dynamical system with a global attractor A with a unique ergodic measure P concentrated on it, which is uniformly parametrized by the mean of the trajectories in a bounded set D containing A. We perturbe this dynamical system by a multiplicative heavy tailed Lévy noise of small intensity ε>0 and solve the asymptotic first exit time and location problem from a bounded domain D around the attractor A in the limit of ε to 0. In contrast to the case of Gaussian perturbations, the exit time has the asymptotically algebraic exit rate as a function of ε,…
Using a new approach, for spectrally negative Lévy processes we find joint Laplace transforms involving the last exit time (from a semi-infinite interval), the value of the process at the last exit time and the associated occupation time, which generalizes some previous results.
Generalizing Kyprianou--Loeffen's refracted Lévy processes, we define a new refracted Lévy process which is a Markov process whose positive and negative motions are Lévy processes different from each other. To construct it we utilize the excursion theory. We study its exit problem and the potential measures of the killed processes. We also discuss approximation problem.
It is proved that the two-sided exits of a Levy process are proper, i.e. not a.s. equal to their one-sided counterparts, if and only if said process is not a subordinator or the negative of a subordinator. Furthermore, Levy processes are characterized, for which the supports of the first exit times from bounded annuli, simultaneously on each of the two events corresponding to exit at the lower and the upper boundary, respectively are unbounded, contain $0$, are equal to $[0,\infty)$.
We construct superharmonic functions and give sharp bounds for the expected exit time and probability of survival for isotropic unimodal Lévy processes
We study the first exit times form a reduced domain of attraction of a stable fixed of the Chafee-Infante equation when perturbed by a heavy tailed Lévy noise with small intensity.
In this paper we study the mean of the first exit time from a bounded interval of various Lévy processes. We establish sharp two-sided estimates of the mean for Lévy processes under certain condition on their characteristic exponents. We also study the cumulative distribution function of the supremum and infimum processes. Finally, we establish integral conditions that assure that the renewal function of the ladder height process is comparable with the linear one.
We consider exit problems for general Lévy processes, where the first passage over a threshold is detected either immediately or at an epoch of an independent homogeneous Poisson process. It is shown that the two corresponding one-sided problems are related through a surprisingly simple identity. Moreover, we identify a simple link between two-sided exit problems with one continuous and one Poisson exit. Finally, Poisson exit of a reflected process is connected to the continuous exit of a process reflected at Poisson epochs, and a link between some Parisian type exit problems is established. W…
In this paper we study first exit times from a bounded domain of a gradient dynamical system $\dot Y_t=-\nabla U(Y_t)$ perturbed by a small multiplicative Lévy noise with heavy tails. A special attention is paid to the way the multiplicative noise is introduced. In particular we determine the asymptotics of the first exit time of solutions of Itô, Stratonovich and Marcus canonical SDEs.
For spectrally negative Lévy processes, we prove several fluctuation results involving a general draw-down time, which is a downward exit time from a dynamic level that depends on the running maximum of the process. In particular, we find expressions of the Laplace transforms for the two-sided exit problems involving the draw-down time. We also find the Laplace transforms for the hitting time and creeping time over the running-maximum related draw-down level, respectively, and obtain an expression for a draw-down associated potential measure. The results are expressed in terms of scale functio…
Using a very simple argument based on the indepenence of increments and the fact that in a finite dimensional space $R^{d}$ there are not too many directions, we derive a theorem stating that exit time of any (non-constant) Lévy process on $R^{d}$ from a ball has exponentially light tails.
For a spectrally one-sided Lévy process, we extend various two-sided exit identities to the situation when the process is only observed at arrival epochs of an independent Poisson process. In addition, we consider exit problems of this type for processes reflected either from above or from below. The resulting Laplace transforms of the main quantities of interest are in terms of scale functions and turn out to be simple analogues of the classical formulas.
We give an explicit construction of the increasing tree-valued process introduced by Abraham and Delmas using a random point process of trees and a grafting procedure. This random point process will be used in companion papers to study record processes on Lévy trees. We use the Poissonian structure of the jumps of the increasing tree-valued process to describe its behavior at the first time the tree grows higher than a given height. We also give the joint distribution of this exit time and the ascension time which corresponds to the first infinite jump of the tree-valued process.
Lewis and Mordecki have computed the Wiener-Hopf factorization of a Lévy process whose restriction on $]0,+\infty[$ of their Lévy measure has a rational Laplace transform. That allows to compute the distribution of $(X_t,\inf_{0\leq s\leq t}X_s)$. For the same class of Lévy processes, we compute the distribution of $ (X_t,\inf_{0\leq s\leq t}X_s,\sup_{0\leq s\leq t} X_s)$ and also the behavior of this triple at certain stopping time, like the first exit time of an interval containing the origin. Some applications to the pricing of double barrier options with or without rebate are evocated.
We show that exact sampling of the first passage event can be done for a Levy process with unbounded variation, if the process can be embedded in a subordinated standard Brownian motion. By sampling a series of first exit events of the Brownian motion and first passage events of the subordinator, the first passage event of interest can be obtained. The sampling of the first exit time and pre-exit location of the Brownian motion may be of independent interest.
This paper is concerned with the behaviour of a Lévy process when it crosses over a positive level, $u$, starting from 0, both as $u$ becomes large and as $u$ becomes small. Our main focus is on the time, $τ_u$, it takes the process to transit above the level, and in particular, on the {\it stability} of this passage time; thus, essentially, whether or not $τ_u$ behaves linearly as $u\dto 0$ or $u\to\infty$. We also consider conditional stability of $τ_u$ when the process drifts to $-\infty$, a.s. This provides information relevant to quantities associated with the ruin of an insurance risk pr…
We review some of the theory relevant to passage times of one-dimensional Lévy processes out of bounded regions, highlighting results that are useful in physical phenomena modelled by heavy-tailed Lévy flights. The process is hypothesised to describe the motion of a particle on the line, starting at $0$, and exiting either a fixed interval $[-r, r]$, $r > 0$, or a time-dependent, expanding, set of intervals of the form $[-r t^κ, r t^κ]$, $r > 0$, $κ> 0$. Asymptotic behaviour of the exit time may be as $r \downarrow 0$ or as $r \to \infty$, but particular emphasis is placed herein on "small tim…
In this paper we study a spectrally negative Lévy process that is reflected at its draw-down level whenever a draw-down time from the running supremum arrives. Using an excursion-theoretical approach, for such a reflected process we find the Laplace transform of the upper exiting time and an expression of the associated potential measure. When the reflected process is identified as a risk process with capital injections, the expected total amount of discounted capital injections prior to the exiting time and the Laplace transform of the accumulated capital injections until the exiting time are…
This article studies the dynamics of a nonlinear dissipative reaction-diffusion equation with well-separated stable states which is perturbed by infinite-dimensional multiplicative Lévy noise with a regularly varying component at intensity $ε>0$. The main results establish the precise asymptotics of the first exit times and locus of the solution $X^ε$ from the domain of attraction of a deterministic stable state, in the limit as $ε\rightarrow 0$. In contrast to the exponential growth for respective Gaussian perturbations the exit times grow essentially as a power function of the noise intensit…
In this paper, an approximate version of the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard model, driven by a Brownian motion and a Lévy subordinator, is formulated. The first-exit time of the log-return process for this model is analyzed. It is shown that with certain probability, the first-exit time process of the log-return is decomposable into the sum of the first exit time of the Brownian motion with drift, and the first exit time of a Lévy subordinator with drift. Subsequently, the probability density functions of the first exit time of some specific Lévy subordinators, connected to stationary, self-de…
We prove that a general (not necessarily symmetric) Lévy process killed on exiting a bounded open set (without regular condition on the boundary) is intrinsically ultracontractive, provided that $B(0,R_0)\subseteq \rm{supp}(ν)$ for some constant $R_0>0$, where $\rm{supp}(ν)$ denotes the support of the associated Lévy measure $ν$. For a symmetric Lévy process killed on exiting a bounded Hölder domain of order $0$, we also obtain the intrinsic ultracontractivity under much weaker assumption on the associated Lévy measure.
We consider a dynamical system described by the differential equation $\dot{Y}_t=-U'(Y_t)$ with a unique stable point at the origin. We perturb the system by the Lévy noise of intensity $\varepsilon$ to obtain the stochastic differential equation $dX^{\varepsilon}_t=-U'(X^{\varepsilon}_{t-}) dt+\varepsilon dL_t.$ The process $L$ is a symmetric Lévy process whose jump measure $ν$ has exponentially light tails, $ν([u,\infty))\sim\exp(-u^α)$, $α>0$, $u\to \infty$. We study the first exit problem for the trajectories of the solutions of the stochastic differential equation from the interval $(-1,1…
In this paper, we formulate a stochastic logistic fish growth model driven by both white noise and non-Gaussian noise. We focus our study on the mean time to extinction, escape probability to measure the noise-induced extinction probability and the Fokker-Planck equation for fish population X(t). In the Gaussian case, these quantities satisfy local partial differential equations while in the non-Gaussian case, they satisfy nonlocal partial differential equations. Following a discussion of existence, uniqueness, and stability, we calculate numerical approximations of the solutions of those equa…
In this paper we solve the exit problems for (reflected) spectrally negative Lévy processes, which are exponentially killed with a killing intensity dependent on the present state of the process and analyze respective resolvents. All identities are given in terms of new generalizations of scale functions. For the particular cases $ω(x)=q$ and $ω(x)=q \mathbf{1}_{(a,b)}(x)$, we obtain results for the classical exit problems and the Laplace transforms of the occupation times in a given interval, until first passage times, respectively. Our results can also be applied to find the bankruptcy proba…
This article studies a linear scalar delay differential equation subject to small multiplicative power tail Lévy noise. We solve the first passage (the Kramers) problem with probabilistic methods and discover an asymptotic loss of memory in this non-Markovian system. Furthermore, the mean exit time increases as the power of the small noise amplitude, whereas the pre-factor accounts for memory effects. In particular, we discover a non-linear delay-induced exit acceleration due to a non-normal growth phenomenon. Our results are illustrated in the well-known linear delay oscillator driven by $α$-…
This work is about low dimensional reduction for a slow-fast data assimilation system with non-Gaussian $α-$stable Lévy noise via stochastic averaging. When the observations are only available for slow components, we show that the averaged, low dimensional filter approximates the original filter, by examining the corresponding Zakai stochastic partial differential equations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the low dimensional slow system approximates the slow dynamics of the original system, by examining parameter estimation and most probable paths.
It is a challenging issue to analyze complex dynamics from observed and simulated data. An advantage of extracting dynamic behaviors from data is that this approach enables the investigation of nonlinear phenomena whose mathematical models are unavailable. The purpose of this present work is to extract information about transition phenomena (e.g., mean exit time and escape probability), from data of stochastic differential equations with non-Gaussian Lévy noise. As a tool in describing dynamical systems, the Koopman semigroup transforms a nonlinear system into a linear system, but at the cost …
We establish a connection between the scattering inverse problem and the determination of the distribution of the position of the Levy process at the exit time of a bounded interval in term of its Levy exponent.
Stochastic Loewner Evolutions (SLE) with a multiple sqrt(kappa)B of Brownian motion B as driving process are random planar curves (if kappa<=4) or growing compact sets generated by a curve (if kappa>4). We consider here more general Levy processes as driving processes and obtain evolutions expected to look like random trees or compact sets generated by trees, respectively. We show that when the driving force is of the form sqrt(kappa)B+theta^(1/alpha)S for a symmetric alpha-stable Levy process S, the cluster has zero or positive Lebesgue measure according to whether kappa<=4 or kappa>4. We als…
Several two-boundary problems are solved for a special Lévy process: the Poisson process with an exponential component. The jumps of this process are controlled by a homogeneous Poisson process, the positive jump size distribution is arbitrary, while the distribution of the negative jumps is exponential. Closed form expressions are obtained for the integral transforms of the joint distribution of the first exit time from an interval and the value of the overshoot through boundaries at the first exit time. Also the joint distribution of the first entry time into the interval and the value of th…
We prove the intrinsic ultracontractivity for the semigroup generated by a large class of symmetric Levy processes such that the Levy measure satisfies some conditions in the neighborhood of 0, killed on exiting a bounded and connected Lipschitz domain.
We give an interpretation of the bilateral exit problem for Lévy processes via the study of an elementary Markov chain. We exhibit a strong connection between this problem and Krein's theory on strings. For instance, for symmetric Lévy processes with bounded variations, the Lévy exponent is the correspondant spectral density and the Wiener-Hopf factorization turns out to be a version of Krein's entropy formula.
For refracted spectrally negative Lévy processes, we identify expressions of several quantities related to Laplace transforms on their weighted occupation times until first exit times. Such quantities are expressed in terms of unique solutions to integral equations involving weight functions and scale functions for the associated spectrally negative Lévy processes. Previous results on refracted Lévy processes are recovered.
This paper solves exit problems for spectrally negative Markov additive processes and their reflections. A so-called scale matrix, which is a generalization of the scale function of a spectrally negative \levy process, plays a central role in the study of exit problems. Existence of the scale matrix was shown in Thm. 3 of Kyprianou and Palmowski (2008). We provide a probabilistic construction of the scale matrix, and identify the transform. In addition, we generalize to the MAP setting the relation between the scale function and the excursion (height) measure. The main technique is based on th…
In this paper we introduce a new class of Lévy processes which we call hypergeometric-stable Lévy processes, because they are obtained from symmetric stable processes through several transformations and where the Gauss hypergeometric function plays an essential role. We characterize the Lévy measure of this class and obtain several useful properties such as the Wiener Hopf factorization, the characteristic exponent and some associated exit problems.
This paper is concerned with the small time behaviour of a Lévy process $X$. In particular, we investigate the {\it stabilities} of the times, $\Tstarb(r)$ and $\Tbarb(r)$, at which $X$, started with $X_0=0$, first leaves the space-time regions $\{(t,y)\in\R^2: y\le rt^b, t\ge 0\}$ (one-sided exit), or $\{(t,y)\in\R^2: |y|\le rt^b, t\ge 0\}$ (two-sided exit), $0\le b<1$, as $r\dto 0$. Thus essentially we determine whether or not these passage times behave like deterministic functions in the sense of different modes of convergence; specifically convergence in probability, almost surely and in $…
In this paper we study the draw-down related Parisian ruin problem for spectrally negative Lévy risk processes. We introduce the draw-down Parisian ruin time and solve the corresponding two-sided exit time via excursion theory. We also obtain an expression of the potential measure for the process killed at the draw-down Parisian time. As applications, new results are obtained for spectrally negative Lévy risk process with dividend barrier and Parisian ruin.
For a Lévy process on the real line, we provide complete criteria for the finiteness of exponential moments of the first passage time into the interval $(r,\infty)$, the sojourn time in the interval $(-\infty,r]$, and the last exit time from $(-\infty,r]$. Moreover, whenever these quantities are finite, we derive their respective asymptotic behavior as $r \to \infty$.
The mean first exit (passage) time characterizes the average time of a stochastic process never leaving a fixed region in the state space, while the escape probability describes the likelihood of a transition from one region to another for a stochastic system driven by discontinuous (with jumps) Lévy motion. This paper discusses the two deterministic quantities, mean first exit time and escape probability, for the anomalous processes having the tempered Lévy stable waiting times with the tempering index $λ>0$ and the stability index $0<α\le 1$; as for the distribution of jump lengths or the ty…
This article concerns the large deviations regime and the consequent solution of the Kramers problem for a two-time scale stochastic system driven by a common jump noise signal perturbed in small intensity $\varepsilon>0$ and with accelerated jumps by intensity $\frac{1}{\varepsilon}$. We establish Freidlin-Wentzell estimates for the slow process of the multiscale system in the small noise limit $\varepsilon \rightarrow 0$ using the weak convergence approach to large deviations theory. The core of our proof is the reduction of the large deviations principle to the establishment of a stochastic…
First passage problems for spectrally negative Lévy processes with possible absorbtion or/and reflection at boundaries have been widely applied in mathematical finance, risk, queueing, and inventory/storage theory. Historically, such problems were tackled by taking Laplace transform of the associated Kolmogorov integro-differential equations involving the generator operator. In the last years there appeared an alternative approach based on the solution of two fundamental "two-sided exit" problems from an interval (TSE). A spectrally one-sided process will exit smoothly on one side on an interv…
The central result of this paper is an analytic duality relation for real-valued Lévy processes killed upon exiting a half-line. By Nagasawa's theorem, this yields a remarkable time-reversal identity involving the Lévy process conditioned to stay positive. As examples of applications, we construct a version of the Lévy process indexed by the entire real line and started from $-\infty$ which enjoys a natural spatial-stationarity property, and point out that the latter leads to a natural Lamperti-type representation for self-similar Markov processes in $(0,\infty)$ started from the entrance poin…
Let $X$ be a symmetric, pure jump, unimodal Levy process in $\mathbb{R}$ with an infinite Levy measure. We prove that for any fixed $t > 0$ the survival probability $P^x(τ_{(-a,a)} > t)$ is nondecreasing on $(-a,0]$, nonincreasing on $[0,a)$ and concave on $(-a/2,a/2)$, where $a > 0$ and $τ_{(-a,a)}$ is the first exit time of the process $X$ from $(-a,a)$. We also show a similar statement for sets $(-a,a) \times F \subset \mathbb{R}^d$.
A systematic exposition of scale functions is given for positive self-similar Markov processes (pssMp) with one-sided jumps. The scale functions express as convolution series of the usual scale functions associated with spectrally one-sided Lévy processes that underly the pssMp through the Lamperti transform. This theory is then brought to bear on solving the spatio-temporal: (i) two-sided exit problem; (ii) joint first passage problem upwards for the the pssMp and its multiplicative drawdown (resp. drawup) in the spectrally negative (resp. positive) case.
In his seminal work from the 1950s, William Feller classified all one-dimensional diffusions on $-\infty\leq a<b\leq \infty$ in terms of their ability to access the boundary (Feller's test for explosions) and to enter the interior from the boundary. Feller's technique is restricted to diffusion processes as the corresponding differential generators allow explicit computations and the use of Hille-Yosida theory. In the present article we study exit and entrance from infinity for the most natural generalization, that is, jump diffusions of the form \[ dZ_t=σ(Z_{t-})\,dX_t, \] driven by stable Lé…
We study the one-dimensional Levy stable density distributions g(alpha, beta; x) for -infty < x < infty, for rational values of index alpha and the asymmetry parameter beta: alpha = l/k and beta = (l - 2r)/k, where l, k and r are positive integers such that 0 < l/k < 1 for 0 <= r <= l and 1 < l/k <= 2 for l-k <= r <= k. We treat both symmetric (beta = 0) and asymmetric (beta neq 0) cases. We furnish exact and explicit forms of g(alpha, beta; x) in terms of known functions for any admissible values of alpha and beta specified by a triple of integers k, l and r. We reproduce all the previously k…
The first-exit time process of an inverse Gaussian Lévy process is considered. The one-dimensional distribution functions of the process are obtained. They are not infinitely divisible and the tail probabilities decay exponentially. These distribution functions can also be viewed as distribution functions of supremum of the Brownian motion with drift. The density function is shown to solve a fractional PDE and the result is also generalized to tempered stable subordinators. The subordination of this process to the Brownian motion is considered and the underlying PDE of the subordinated process…
We consider a general class of finite dimensional deterministic dynamical systems with finitely many local attractors $K^i$ each of which supports a unique ergodic probability measure $P^i$, which includes in particular the class of Morse-Smale systems in any finite dimension. The dynamical system is perturbed by a multiplicative non-Gaussian heavy-tailed Lévy type noise of small amplitude $\varepsilon>0$. Specifically we consider perturbations leading to a Itô, Stratonovich and canonical (Marcus) stochastic differential equation. The respective asymptotic first exit time and location problem …
We consider the one-sided exit problem for (fractionally) integrated random walks and Lévy processes. We prove that the rate of decrease of the non-exit probability -- the so-called survival exponent -- is universal in this class of processes. In particular, the survival exponent can be inferred from the (fractionally) integrated Brownian motion. This, in particular, extends Sinai's result on the survival exponent for the integrated simple random walk to general random walks with some finite exponential moment. Further, we prove existence and monotonicity of the survival exponent of fractional…
We consider some special classes of Lévy processes with no gaussian component whose Lévy measure is of the type $π(dx)=e^{γx}ν(e^x-1) dx$, where $ν$ is the density of the stable Lévy measure and $γ$ is a positive parameter which depends on its characteristics. These processes were introduced in \cite{CC} as the underlying Lévy processes in the Lamperti representation of conditioned stable Lévy processes. In this paper, we compute explicitly the law of these Lévy processes at their first exit time from a finite or semi-finite interval, the law of their exponential functional and the first hitti…
We provide integral formulae for the Laplace transform of the entrance law of the reflected excursions for symmetric Lévy processes in terms of their characteristic exponent. For subordinate Brownian motions and stable processes we express the density of the entrance law in terms of the generalized eigenfunctions for the semigroup of the process killed when exiting the positive half-line. We use the formulae to study in-depth properties of the density of the entrance law such as asymptotic behavior of its derivatives in time variable.
For a spectrally negative Lévy process (snLp) $X$, killed according to a rate that is a function $ω$ of its position, we analyse the exit probability of the one-sided upwards-passage problem. When $ω$ is strictly positive, this problem is related to the determination of the Laplace transform of the first passage time upwards for $X$ that has been time-changed by the inverse of the additive functional $\int_0^\cdot ω(X_u)du$. In particular our findings thus shed extra light on related results concerning first passage times upwards (downwards) of spectrally negative positive self-similar Markov …