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 exponential time is infinitely divisible. As an illustration of the results we discuss Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes.
We demonstrate the existence of a "Lévy system" for the excursions of a one-dimensional diffusion process above its past-minimum process. As applications we provide a direct proof of D. Williams' decomposition (in both a global and a local form) and of a theorem of W. Vervaat.
We consider systems of interacting diffusions with local population regulation. Our main result shows that the total mass process of such a system is bounded above by the total mass process of a tree of excursions with appropriate drift and diffusion coefficients. As a corollary, this entails a sufficient, explicit condition for extinction of the total mass as time tends to infinity. On the way to our comparison result, we establish that systems of interacting diffusions with uniform migration between finitely many islands converge to a tree of excursions as the number of islands tends to infi…
It is well-known that the excursions of a one-dimensional diffusion process can be studied by considering a certain Riccati equation associated with the process. We show that, in many cases of interest, the Riccati equation can be solved in terms of an infinite continued fraction. We examine the probabilistic significance of the expansion. To illustrate our results, we discuss some examples of diffusions in deterministic and in random environments.
We study limit distributions for random variables defined in terms of coefficients of a power series which is determined by a certain linear functional equation. Our technique combines the method of moments with the kernel method of algebraic combinatorics. As limiting distributions the area distributions of the Brownian excursion and meander occur. As combinatorial applications we compute the area laws for discrete excursions and meanders with an arbitrary finite set of steps and the area distribution of column convex polyominoes. As a by-product of our approach we find the joint distribution…
Let $a\in (0,\infty)$. For a spectrally negative Lévy process $X$ with infinite variation paths the resolvent of the process killed on hitting the two-point set $V=\{-a,a\}$ is identified. When further $X$ has no diffusion component the Laplace transforms of the entrance laws of the excursion measures of $X$ from $V$ are determined. This is then applied to establishing the Laplace transform of the amount of time that elapses between the last visit of $X$ to a given point $x$, before hitting some other point $y>x$, and the hitting time of $y$. All the expressions are explicit and tractable in t…
Several phase transitions for excited random walks on the integers are known to be characterized by a certain drift parameter delta. For recurrence/transience the critical threshold is |delta|=1, for ballisticity it is |delta|=2 and for diffusivity |delta|=4. In this paper we establish a phase transition at |delta|=3. We show that the expected return time of the walker to the starting point, conditioned on return, is finite iff |delta|>3. This result follows from an explicit description of the tail behaviour of the return time as a function of delta, which is achieved by diffusion approximatio…
We compute the joint distribution of the first times a linear diffusion makes an excursion longer than some given duration above (resp. below) some fixed level. In the literature, such stopping times have been introduced and studied in the framework of \emph{Parisian} barrier options, mainly in the case of Brownian motion with drift. We also exhibit several independence properties, and provide some formulae for the associated ruin probabilities.
We consider a spectrally positive Lévy process $X$ that does not drift to $+\infty$, viewed as coding for the genealogical structure of a (sub)critical branching process, in the sense of a contour or exploration process \cite{GaJa98,Lam10}. We denote by $I$ the past infimum process defined for each $t\geq 0$ by $I_t:= \inf_{[0,t]} X$ and we let $γ$ be the unique time at which the excursion of the reflected process $X-I$ away from 0 attains its supremum. We prove that the pre-$γ$ and the post-$γ$ subpaths of this excursion are invariant under space-time reversal, which has several other consequ…
Detecting Stochasticity in Discrete Signals via Nonparametric Excursion Theorem
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学机械工程系）；Dept. of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学计算数学、科学与工程系）
For three constrained Brownian motions, the excursion, the meander, and the reflected bridge, the densities of the maximum and of the time to reach it were expressed as double series by Majumdar, Randon-Furling, Kearney, and Yor (2008). Some of these series were regularized by Abel summation. Similar results for Bessel processes were obtained by Schehr and Le Doussal (2010) using the real space renormalization group method. Here this work is reviewed, and extended from the point of view of one-dimensional diffusion theory to some other diffusion processes including skew Brownian bridges and ge…
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…
We study boundary traces of shift-invariant diffusions: two-dimensional diffusions in the upper half-plane $\mathbb{R} \times [0, \infty)$ (or in $\mathbb{R} \times [0, R)$) invariant under horizontal translations. We prove that the corresponding trace processes are Lévy processes with completely monotone jumps, and, conversely, every Lévy process with completely monotone jumps is a boundary trace of some shift-invariant diffusion. Up to some natural transformations of space and time, this correspondence is bijective. We also reformulate this result in the language of additive functionals of t…
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…
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.
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 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 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 obtain a representation of Feller's branching diffusion with logistic growth in terms of the local times of a reflected Brownian motion $H$ with a drift that is affine linear in the local time accumulated by $H$ at its current level. As in the classical Ray-Knight representation, the excursions of $H$ are the exploration paths of the trees of descendants of the ancestors at time $t=0$, and the local time of $H$ at height $t$ measures the population size at time $t$ (see e.g. \cite{LG4}). We cope with the dependence in the reproduction by introducing a pecking order of individuals: an indivi…
We propose an approach to approximate the boundary crossing probabilities for general one-dimensional diffusion processes, and derive the convergence rate for this approximation scheme. There results are based on the explicit expression of the Laplace transforms of the first passage densities for diffusions with piecewise linear drifts. The proposed method is applied to a reliability problem where the standard degradation model based on Wiener process is extended to diffusion processes with piecewise linear drifts.
In this article, we obtain a functional CLT for a class of degenerate diffusion processes with periodic coefficients, thus generalizing the already classical results in the context of uniformly elliptic diffusions. As an application, we also discuss periodic homogenization of a class of linear degenerate elliptic and parabolic PDEs.
We establish the existence of solutions to a class of non-linear stochastic differential equation of reaction-diffusion type in an infinite-dimensional space, with diffusion corresponding to a given transition kernel. The solution obtained is the scaling limit of a sequence of interacting particle systems, and satisfies the martingale problem corresponding to the target differential equation.
In order to approximate the exit time of a one-dimensional diffusion process, we propose an algorithm based on a random walk. Such an algorithm was already introduced in both the Brownian context and in the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck context. Here the aim is therefore to generalize this efficient numerical approach in order to obtain an approximation of both the exit time and position for either a general linear diffusion or a growth diffusion. The efficiency of the method is described with particular care through theoretical results and numerical examples.
We consider an interacting particle system with two species under strong competition dynamics between the two species. Then, through the hydrodynamic limit procedure for the microscopic model, we derive a one-phase Stefan type free boundary problem with non-linear diffusion, letting the competition rate divergent. Non-linearity of diffusion comes from a zero-range dynamics for one species while we impose the other species to weakly diffuse according to the Kawasaki dynamics for technical reasons, which macroscopically corresponds to the vanishing viscosity method.
We perform a fast-reaction limit for a linear reaction-diffusion system consisting of two diffusion equations coupled by a linear reaction. We understand the linear reaction-diffusion system as a gradient flow of the free energy in the space of probability measure equipped with a geometric structure, which contains the Wasserstein metric for the diffusion part and cosh-type functions for the reaction part. The fast-reaction limit is done on the level of the gradient structure by proving EDP-convergence with tilting. The limit gradient system induces a diffusion system with Lagrange multipliers…
