The 33rd Bernoulli Society Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications was held in Berlin from July 27 to July 31, 2009. It brought together more than 600 researchers from 49 countries to discuss recent progress in the mathematical research related to stochastic processes, with applications ranging from biology to statistical mechanics, finance and climatology. This book collects survey articles highlighting new trends and focal points in the area written by plenary speakers of the conference, all of them outstanding international experts. A particular aim of this collection is to inspire young scientists to pursue research goals in the wide range of fields represented in this volume.

A nonmeasure theoretic introduction to stochastic processes. Considers its diverse range of applications and provides readers with probabilistic intuition and insight in thinking about problems. This revised edition contains additional material on compound Poisson random variables including an identity which can be used to efficiently compute moments; a new chapter on Poisson approximations; and coverage of the mean time spent in transient states as well as examples relating to the Gibb's sampler, the Metropolis algorithm and mean cover time in star graphs. Numerous exercises and problems have been added throughout the text.

The book is devoted to the results on large deviations for a class of stochastic processes. Following an introduction and overview, the material is presented in three parts. Part 1 gives necessary and sufficient conditions for exponential tightness that are analogous to conditions for tightness in the theory of weak convergence. Part 2 focuses on Markov processes in metric spaces. For a sequence of such processes, convergence of Fleming's logarithmically transformed nonlinear semigroups is shown to imply the large deviation principle in a manner analogous to the use of convergence of linear semigroups in weak convergence. Viscosity solution methods provide applicable conditions for the necessary convergence. Part 3 discusses methods for verifying the comparison principle for viscosity solutions and applies the general theory to obtain a variety of new and known results on large deviations for Markov processes. In examples concerning infinite dimensional state spaces, new comparison principles are de

This introduction to probability-based modeling covers basic stochastic tools used in physics, chemistry, engineering and the life sciences. Topics covered include conditional expectations, stochastic processes, Langevin equations, and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The applications include data assimilation, prediction from partial data, spectral analysis and turbulence. A special feature is the systematic analysis of memory effects.

Self-similar processes are stochastic processes that are invariant in distribution under suitable time scaling, and are a subject intensively studied in the last few decades. This book presents the basic properties of these processes and focuses on the study of their variation using stochastic analysis. While self-similar processes, and especially fractional Brownian motion, have been discussed in several books, some new classes have recently emerged in the scientific literature. Some of them are extensions of fractional Brownian motion (bifractional Brownian motion, subtractional Brownian motion, Hermite processes), while others are solutions to the partial differential equations driven by fractional noises. In this monograph the author discusses the basic properties of these new classes of self-similar processes and their interrelationship. At the same time a new approach (based on stochastic calculus, especially Malliavin calculus) to studying the behavior of the variations of self-similar processes has been developed over the last decade. This work surveys these recent techniques and findings on limit theorems and Malliavin calculus.

This book provides an in-depth account of modern methods used to bound the supremum of stochastic processes. Starting from first principles, it takes the reader to the frontier of current research. This second edition has been completely rewritten, offering substantial improvements to the exposition and simplified proofs, as well as new results. The book starts with a thorough account of the generic chaining, a remarkably simple and powerful method to bound a stochastic process that should belong to every probabilist’s toolkit. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated by the characterization of sample boundedness of Gaussian processes. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the wealth of ideas and results generated by thirty years of efforts to extend this result to more general classes of processes, culminating in the recent solution of several key conjectures. A large part of this unique book is devoted to the author’s influential work. While many of the results presented are rather advanced, others bear on the very foundations of probability theory. In addition to providing an invaluable reference for researchers, the book should therefore also be of interest to a wide range of readers.