Proceedings of a conference held in Santa Barbara, California, May 20-22, 1993

A rigorous mathematical treatment of the technique for studying the properties of an experimental situation.

Since its introduction in 1972, Stein’s method has offered a completely novel way of evaluating the quality of normal approximations. Through its characterizing equation approach, it is able to provide approximation error bounds in a wide variety of situations, even in the presence of complicated dependence. Use of the method thus opens the door to the analysis of random phenomena arising in areas including statistics, physics, and molecular biology. Though Stein's method for normal approximation is now mature, the literature has so far lacked a complete self contained treatment. This volume contains thorough coverage of the method’s fundamentals, includes a large number of recent developments in both theory and applications, and will help accelerate the appreciation, understanding, and use of Stein's method by providing the reader with the tools needed to apply it in new situations. It addresses researchers as well as graduate students in Probability, Statistics and Combinatorics.

The Mathieu series is a functional series introduced by Émile Léonard Mathieu for the purposes of his research on the elasticity of solid bodies. Bounds for this series are needed for solving biharmonic equations in a rectangular domain. In addition to Tomovski and his coauthors, Pogany, Cerone, H. M. Srivastava, J. Choi, etc. are some of the known authors who published results concerning the Mathieu series, its generalizations and their alternating variants. Applications of these results are given in classical, harmonic and numerical analysis, analytical number theory, special functions, mathematical physics, probability, quantum field theory, quantum physics, etc. Integral representations, analytical inequalities, asymptotic expansions and behaviors of some classes of Mathieu series are presented in this book. A systematic study of probability density functions and probability distributions associated with the Mathieu series, its generalizations and Planck’s distribution is also presented. The book is addressed at graduate and PhD students and researchers in mathematics and physics who are interested in special functions, inequalities and probability distributions.

A substantial amount of research has been conducted on consecutive k-out-of-n and related reliability systems over the past four decades. These systems have been used to model various engineering systems such as the microwave stations of telecoms network, oil pipeline systems, and vacuum systems in an electron accelerator. As such, studies of reliability properties of consecutive k-out-of-n structures have attracted significant attention from both theoretical and practical approaches. In the modern era of technology, the redundancies are employed in the various industrial systems to prevent them from failure/sudden failure or to recover from failures. This book is meant to provide knowledge and help engineers and academicians in understanding reliability engineering by using k-out-of-n structures. The material is also targeted at postgraduate or senior undergraduate students pursuing reliability engineering.

This Festschrift in honour of Paul Deheuvels’ 65th birthday compiles recent research results in the area between mathematical statistics and probability theory with a special emphasis on limit theorems. The book brings together contributions from invited international experts to provide an up-to-date survey of the field. Written in textbook style, this collection of original material addresses researchers, PhD and advanced Master students with a solid grasp of mathematical statistics and probability theory.