Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

Recurrence times and the number of renewals in $(0,t]$ are fundamental quantities in renewal theory. Firstly, it is proved that the upper orthant order for the pair of the forward and backward recurrence times may result in NWUC (NBUC) interarrivals. It is also demonstrated that, under DFR interarrival times, the backward recurrence time is smaller than the forward recurrence time in the hazard rate order. Lastly, the sign of the covariance between the forward recurrence time and the number of renewals in $(0,t]$ at a fixed time point t and when $t\to \infty $ is studied assuming that the interarrival distribution belongs to certain ageing classes.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a classical technique of dimension reduction for multivariate data. When the data are a mixture of subjects from different subpopulations one can be interested in PCA of some (or each) subpopulation separately. In this paper estimators are considered for PC directions and corresponding eigenvectors of subpopulations in the nonparametric model of mixture with varying concentrations. Consistency and asymptotic normality of obtained estimators are proved. These results allow one to construct confidence sets for the PC model parameters. Performance of such confidence intervals for the leading eigenvalues is investigated via simulations.

A complex-valued linear mixture model is considered for discrete weakly stationary processes. Latent components of interest are recovered, which underwent a linear mixing. Asymptotic properties are studied of a classical unmixing estimator which is based on simultaneous diagonalization of the covariance matrix and an autocovariance matrix with lag τ. The main contributions are asymptotic results that can be applied to a large class of processes. In related literature, the processes are typically assumed to have weak correlations. This class is extended, and the unmixing estimator is considered under stronger dependency structures. In particular, the asymptotic behavior of the unmixing estimator is estimated for both long- and short-range dependent complex-valued processes. Consequently, this theory covers unmixing estimators that converge slower than the usual $\sqrt{T}$ and unmixing estimators that produce non-Gaussian asymptotic distributions. The presented methodology is a powerful preprocessing tool and highly applicable in several fields of statistics.

Sufficient conditions are given for the existence of a unique bounded in the mean solution to a second-order difference equation with jumps of operator coefficients in a Banach space. The question of the proximity of this solution to the stationary solution of the corresponding difference equation with constant operator coefficients is studied.

In this study, we consider a bias reduction of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters of a Gaussian second-order moving average (MA(2)) model. In many cases, we use the maximum likelihood estimator because the estimator is consistent. However, when the sample size n is small, the error is large because it has a bias of $O({n^{-1}})$. Furthermore, the exact form of the maximum likelihood estimator for moving average models is slightly complicated even for Gaussian models. We sometimes rely on simpler maximum likelihood estimation methods. As one of the methods, we focus on the conditional maximum likelihood estimator and examine the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimator for a Gaussian MA(2) model. Moreover, we propose new estimators for the unknown parameters of the Gaussian MA(2) model based on the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators. By performing simulations, we investigate properties of this bias, as well as the asymptotic variance of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters. Finally, we confirm the validity of the new estimators through this simulation study.

Probabilistic properties of vantage point trees are studied. A vp-tree built from a sequence of independent identically distributed points in ${[-1,\hspace{0.1667em}1]^{d}}$ with the ${\ell _{\infty }}$-distance function is considered. The length of the leftmost path in the tree, as well as partitions over the space it produces are analyzed. The results include several convergence theorems regarding these characteristics, as the number of nodes in the tree tends to infinity.

We study convexity properties of the Rényi entropy as function of $\alpha >0$ on finite alphabets. We also describe robustness of the Rényi entropy on finite alphabets, and it turns out that the rate of respective convergence depends on initial alphabet. We establish convergence of the disturbed entropy when the initial distribution is uniform but the number of events increases to ∞ and prove that the limit of Rényi entropy of the binomial distribution is equal to Rényi entropy of the Poisson distribution.

A linear structural regression model is studied, where the covariate is observed with a mixture of the classical and Berkson measurement errors. Both variances of the classical and Berkson errors are assumed known. Without normality assumptions, consistent estimators of model parameters are constructed and conditions for their asymptotic normality are given. The estimators are divided into two asymptotically independent groups.

Sharp large deviation results of Bahadur–Ranga Rao type are provided for the q-norm of random vectors distributed on the ${\ell _{p}^{n}}$-ball ${\mathbb{B}_{p}^{n}}$ according to the cone probability measure or the uniform distribution for $1\le q<p<\infty $, thereby furthering previous large deviation results by Kabluchko, Prochno and Thäle in the same setting. These results are then applied to deduce sharp asymptotics for intersection volumes of different ${\ell _{p}^{n}}$-balls in the spirit of Schechtman and Schmuckenschläger, and for the length of the projection of an ${\ell _{p}^{n}}$-ball onto a line with uniform random direction. The sharp large deviation results are proven by providing convenient probabilistic representations of the q-norms, employing local limit theorems to approximate their densities, and then using geometric results for asymptotic expansions of Laplace integrals to integrate these densities and derive concrete probability estimates.