This reference text presents comprehensive coverage of the various notions of stochastic orderings, their closure properties, and their applications. Some of these orderings are routinely used in many applications in economics, finance, insurance, management science, operations research, statistics, and various other fields. And the value of the other notions of stochastic orderings needs further exploration. This book is an ideal reference for those interested in decision making under uncertainty and interested in the analysis of complex stochastic systems. It is suitable as a text for advanced graduate course on stochastic ordering and applications.

Stochastic orders and inequalities are being used at an accelerated rate in many diverse areas of probability and statistics. This book provides the first unified, systematic, and accessible treatment of stochasticorders, addressing the growing importance of these orders with the presentation of numerous results that illustrate their usefulness and applicability. Ten insightful chapters emphasize the applications by specialists in probability and statistics, economics, operations research, and reliability theory. Applications include multivariate variability, epidemics, comparisons of risk and risk aversion, scheduling, and systems reliability theory.

An Introduction to Stochastic Orders discusses this powerful tool that can be used in comparing probabilistic models in different areas such as reliability, survival analysis, risks, finance, and economics. The book provides a general background on this topic for students and researchers who want to use it as a tool for their research. In addition, users will find detailed proofs of the main results and applications to several probabilistic models of interest in several fields, and discussions of fundamental properties of several stochastic orders, in the univariate and multivariate cases, along with applications to probabilistic models. - Introduces stochastic orders and its notation - Discusses different orders of univariate stochastic orders - Explains multivariate stochastic orders and their convex, likelihood ratio, and dispersive orders

Stochastic Orders in Reliability and Risk Management is composed of 19 contributions on the theory of stochastic orders, stochastic comparison of order statistics, stochastic orders in reliability and risk analysis, and applications. These review/exploratory chapters present recent and current research on stochastic orders reported at the International Workshop on Stochastic Orders in Reliability and Risk Management, or SORR2011, which took place in the City Hotel, Xiamen, China, from June 27 to June 29, 2011. The conference’s talks and invited contributions also represent the celebration of Professor Moshe Shaked, who has made comprehensive, fundamental contributions to the theory of stochastic orders and its applications in reliability, queueing modeling, operations research, economics and risk analysis. This volume is in honor of Professor Moshe Shaked. The work presented in this volume represents active research on stochastic orders and multivariate dependence, and exemplifies close collaborations between scholars working in different fields. The Xiamen Workshop and this volume seek to revive the community workshop tradition on stochastic orders and dependence and strengthen research collaboration, while honoring the work of a distinguished scholar.

This book introduces stochastic processes and their applications for students in engineering, industrial statistics, science, operations research, business, and finance. It provides the theoretical foundations for modeling time-dependent random phenomena encountered in these disciplines. Through numerous science and engineering-based examples and exercises, the author presents the subject in a comprehensible, practically oriented way, but he also includes some important proofs and theoretically challenging examples and exercises that will appeal to more mathematically minded readers. Solutions to most of the exercises are included either in an appendix or within the text.

The subject of modelling and application of stochastic processes is too vast to be exhausted in a single volume. In this book, attention is focused on a small subset of this vast subject. The primary emphasis is on realization and approximation of stochastic systems. Recently there has been considerable interest in the stochastic realization problem, and hence, an attempt has been made here to collect in one place some of the more recent approaches and algorithms for solving the stochastic realiza tion problem. Various different approaches for realizing linear minimum-phase systems, linear nonminimum-phase systems, and bilinear systems are presented. These approaches range from time-domain methods to spectral-domain methods. An overview of the chapter contents briefly describes these approaches. Also, in most of these chapters special attention is given to the problem of developing numerically ef ficient algorithms for obtaining reduced-order (approximate) stochastic realizations. On the application side, chapters on use of Markov random fields for modelling and analyzing image signals, use of complementary models for the smoothing problem with missing data, and nonlinear estimation are included. Chapter 1 by Klein and Dickinson develops the nested orthogonal state space realization for ARMA processes. As suggested by the name, nested orthogonal realizations possess two key properties; (i) the state variables are orthogonal, and (ii) the system matrices for the (n + l)st order realization contain as their "upper" n-th order blocks the system matrices from the n-th order realization (nesting property).

Permutation testing for multivariate stochastic ordering and ANOVA designs is a fundamental issue in many scientific fields such as medicine, biology, pharmaceutical studies, engineering, economics, psychology, and social sciences. This book presents new advanced methods and related R codes to perform complex multivariate analyses. The prerequisites are a standard course in statistics and some background in multivariate analysis and R software.