Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

We investigate the convergence of hitting times for jump-diffusion processes. Specifically, we study a sequence of stochastic differential equations with jumps. Under reasonable assumptions, we establish the convergence of solutions to the equations and of the moments when the solutions hit certain sets.

We show that if a random variable is the final value of an adapted log-Hölder continuous process, then it can be represented as a stochastic integral with respect to a fractional Brownian motion with adapted integrand. In order to establish this representation result, we extend the definition of the fractional integral.

We consider the Black–Scholes model of financial market modified to capture the stochastic nature of volatility observed at real financial markets. For volatility driven by the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, we establish the existence of equivalent martingale measure in the market model. The option is priced with respect to the minimal martingale measure for the case of uncorrelated processes of volatility and asset price, and an analytic expression for the price of European call option is derived. We use the inverse Fourier transform of a characteristic function and the Gaussian property of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process.

We obtain weak rates for approximation of an integral functional of a Markov process by integral sums. An assumption on the process is formulated only in terms of its transition probability density, and, therefore, our approach is not strongly dependent on the structure of the process. Applications to the estimates of the rates of approximation of the Feynman–Kac semigroup and of the price of “occupation-time options” are provided.

We establish the Gärtner–Ellis condition for the square of an asymptotically stationary Gaussian process. The same limit holds for the conditional distribution given any fixed initial point, which entails weak multiplicative ergodicity. The limit is shown to be the Laplace transform of a convolution of gamma distributions with Poisson compound of exponentials. A proof based on the Wiener–Hopf factorization induces a probabilistic interpretation of the limit in terms of a regression problem.

We show that every multiparameter Gaussian process with integrable variance function admits a Wiener integral representation of Fredholm type with respect to the Brownian sheet. The Fredholm kernel in the representation can be constructed as the unique symmetric square root of the covariance. We analyze the equivalence of multiparameter Gaussian processes by using the Fredholm representation and show how to construct series expansions for multiparameter Gaussian processes by using the Fredholm kernel.

We obtain limit theorems for extreme residuals in linear regression model in the case of minimax estimation of parameters.