Past Stochastic Analysis Seminar

We obtain a new identity giving a quintuple law of overshoot, time of

overshoot, undershoot, last maximum, and time of last maximum of a general Levy

process at ?rst passage. The identity is a simple product of the jump measure

and its ascending and descending bivariate renewal measures. With the help of

this identity, we consider applications for passage problems of stable

processes, recovering and extending results of V. Vigon on the bivariate jump

measure of the ascending ladder process of a general Levy process and present

some new results for asymptotic overshoot distributions for Levy processes with

regularly varying jump measures.

(Parts of this talk are based on joint work with Ron Doney and Claudia

Kluppelberg)

In recent years, the use of random planar maps as discretized random surfaces has received a considerable attention in the physicists community. It is believed that the large-scale properties, or the scaling limit of these objects should not depend on the local properties of these maps, a phenomenon called universality.

By using a bijection due to Bouttier-di Francesco-Guitter between certain classes of planar maps and certain decorated trees, we give instances of such universality

phenomenons when the random maps follow a Boltzmann distribution where each face with degree $2i$ receives a nonnegative weight $q(i)$. For example, we show that under

certain regularity hypothesis for the weight sequence, the radius of the random map conditioned to have $n$ faces scales as $n^{1/4}$, as predicted by physicists and shown in the case of quadrangulations by Chassaing and Schaeffer. Our main tool is a new invariance principle for multitype Galton-Watson trees and discrete snakes.

The aging of spin-glasses has been of much interest in the last decades. Since its explanation in the context of real spin-glass models is out of reach, several effective models were proposed in physics literature. In my talk I will present how aging can be rigorously proved in so called trap models and what is the mechanism leading to it. In particular I will concentrate on conditions leading to the fact that one of usual observables used in trap models converges to arc-sine law for Levy processes.

Random Walks in Dirichlet Environment play a special role among random walks in random environments since the annealed law corresponds to the law of an edge oriented reinforced random walks. We will give few results concerning the ballistic behaviour of these walks and some properties of the asymptotic velocity. We will also compare the behaviour of these walks with general random walks in random environments in the limit of small disorder

We show that the solutions of stochastic differential equations converge in

the rough path metric as the coefficients of these equations converge in a

suitable lipschitz norm. We then use this fact to obtain results about

differential equations driven by the Brownian rough path.

It is now known that the overall behaviour of a simple random walk (SRW) on

supercritical (p>p_c) percolation cluster in Z^d is similiar to that of the SRW

in Z^d. The critical case (p=p_c) is much harder, and one needs to define the

'incipient infinite cluster' (IIC). Alexander and Orbach conjectured in 1982

that the return probability for the SRW on the IIC after n steps decays like

n^{2/3} in any dimension. The easiest case is that of trees; this was studied by

Kesten in 1986, but we can now revisit this problem with new techniques.

The Yang-Mills energy is a non-negative functional on the space of connections on a principal bundle over a Riemannian manifold. At a heuristical level, this energy determines a Gibbs measure which is called the Yang-Mills measure. When the manifold is a surface, a stochastic process can be constructed - at least in two different ways - which is a sensible candidate for the random holonomy of a connection distributed according to the Yang-Mills measure. This process is constructed by using some specifications given by physicists of its distribution, namely some of its finite-dimensional marginals, which of course physicists have derived from the Yang-Mills energy, but by non-rigorous arguments. Without assuming any familiarity with this stochastic process, I will present a large deviations result which is the first rigorous link between the Yang-Mills energy and the Yang-Mills measure.

The estimation of heat kernels has been of much interest in various settings. Often, the spaces considered have some kind of uniformity in the volume growth. Recent results have shown that this is not the case for certain random fractal sets. I will present heat kernel bounds for spaces admitting a suitable resistance form, when the volume growth is not uniform, which are motivated by these examples.

We study diploid branching particle models and its behaviour when rapid

stirring, i.e. rapid exchange of particles between neighbouring spatial

sites, is added to the interaction. The particle models differ from the

``usual'' models in that they all involve two types of particles, male

and female, and branching can only occur when both types of particles

are present. We establish the existence of nontrivial stationary

distributions for various models when birth rates are sufficiently large.

We aim at presenting some aspects of stochastic calculus via regularization

in relation with integrator processes which are generally not semimartingales.

Significant examples of those processes are Dirichlet processes, Lyons-Zheng

processes and fractional (resp. bifractional) Brownian motion. A Dirichlet

process X is the sum of a local martingale M and a zero quadratic variation

process A. We will put the emphasis on a generalization of Dirichlet processes.

A weak Dirichlet process is the sum of local martingale M and a process A such

that [A,N] = 0 where N is any martingale with respect to an underlying

filtration. Obviously a Dirichlet process is a weak Dirichlet process. We will

illustrate partly the following application fields.

Analysis of stochastic integrals related to fluidodynamical models considered

for instance by A. Chorin, F. Flandoli and coauthors...

Stochastic differential equations with distributional drift and related

stochastic control theory.

The talk will partially cover joint works with M. Errami, F. Flandoli, F.

Gozzi, G. Trutnau.

I will show rough path estimates for smooth L^p functions whose derivatives are in L^q. The application part related to (linear or nonlinear) Fourier analysis will be also discussed.

This talk attempts to survey key aspects of the mathematics that has been developed in recent years towards an explicit understanding of the structure of exponential functionals of Brownian motion, starting with work of Yor's in the 1990s

It is known that a continuous path of bounded variation

can be reconstructed from a sequence of its iterated integrals (called the signature) in a similar way to a function on the circle being reconstructed from its Fourier coefficients. We study the radius of convergence of the corresponding logarithmic signature for paths in an arbitrary Banach space. This convergence has important consequences for control theory (in particular, it can be used for computing the logarithm of a flow)and the efficiency of numerical approximations to solutions of SDEs. We also discuss the nonlinear structure of the space of logarithmic signatures and the problem of reconstructing a path by its signature.

We introduce conditions in the spirit of $(T)$ and $(T')$ of the discrete setting, that imply, when $d \geq 2$, a law of large numbers with non-vanishing limiting velocity (which we refer to as 'ballistic behavior') and a central limit theorem with non-degenerate covariance matrix. As an application of our results, we consider the class of diffusions where the diffusion matrix is the identity, and give a concrete criterion on the drift term under which the diffusion in random environment exhibits ballistic behavior.

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It is well-known that the only space-time scaling limits of Galton-Watson processes are continuous-state branching processes. Their genealogical structure is most explicitly expressed by discrete trees and R-trees, respectively. Weak limit theorems have been recently established for some of these random trees. We study here a Markovian forest growth procedure that allows to construct the genealogical forest of any continuous-state branching process with immigration as an a.s. limit of Galton-Watson forests with edge lengths. Furthermore, we are naturally led to continuous forests with edge lengths. Another strength of our method is that it yields results in the general supercritical case that was excluded in most of the previous literature.

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It became apparent during the last decade that in several questions in classical complex analysis extremal configurations are fractal, making them very difficult to attack: it is not even clear how to construct or describe extremal objects. We will argue that the most promising approach is to consider conformally self-similar random configurations, which should be extremal almost surely.

Fragmentation processes model the evolution of a particle that split as time goes on. When small particles split fast enough, the fragmentation is intensive and the initial mass is reduced to dust in finite time. We encode such fragmentation into a continuum random tree (CRT) in the sense of Aldous. When the splitting times are dense near 0, the fragmentation CRT is in turn encoded into a continuous (height) function. Under some mild hypotheses, we calculate the Hausdorff dimension of the CRT, as well as the maximal H

Given a countable set of sites S an a transition matrix p(x,y) on that set, we consider a process of particles evolving on S according to the following rule: each particle waits an exponential time and then jumps following a Markov chain governed by p(x,y); the particle keeps jumping until it reaches an empty site where it remains for another exponential time. Unlike most interacting particle systems, this process fails to

have the Feller property. This causes several technical difficulties to study it. We present a method to prove that certain measures are invariant for the process and exploit the Kolmogorov zero or one law to study some of its unusual path properties.

According to the Stokes-Einstein law, microscopic particles subject to intense bombardment by (much smaller) gas molecules perform Brownian motion with a diffusivity inversely proportion to their radius. Smoluchowski, shortly after Einstein's account of Brownian motion, used this model to explain the behaviour of a cloud of such particles when, in addition their diffusive motion, they coagulate on collision. He wrote down a system of evolution equations for the densities of particles of each size, in particular identifying the collision rate as a function of particle size.

We give a rigorous derivation of (a spatially inhomogeneous generalization of) Smoluchowski's equations, as the limit of a sequence of Brownian particle systems with coagulation on collision. The equations are shown to have a unique, mass-preserving solution. A detailed limiting picture emerges describing the ancestral spatial tree of particles making up each particle in the current population. The limit is established at the level of these trees.

We describe a nice example of duality between coagulation and fragmentation associated with certain Dirichlet distributions. The fragmentation and coalescence chains we derive arise naturally in the context of the genealogy of Yule processes.

We propose two models of the evolution of a pair of competing populations. Both are lattice based. The first is a compromise between fully spatial models, which do not appear amenable to analytic results, and interacting particle system models, which don't, at present, incorporate all the competitive strategies that a population might adopt. The second is a simplification of the first in which competition is only supposed to act within lattice sites and the total population size within each lattice point is a constant. In a special case, this second model is dual to a branching-annihilating random walk. For each model, using a comparison with N-dependent oriented percolation, we show that for certain parameter values both populations will coexist for all time with positive probability.

As a corollary we deduce survival for all time of branching annihilating random walk for sufficiently large branching rates.

We also present conjectures relating to the role of space in the survival probabilities for the two populations.

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Ergodic Markov processes possess invariant measures. In the case if transition probabilities or SDE coefficients depend on a parameter, it is important to know whether these measures depend regularly on this parameter. Results of this kind will be discussed. Another close topic is whether approximations to Markov diffusions possess ergodic properties similar to those of the limiting processes. Some partial answer to this question will be presented.

I shall talk on recent results on behaviour of solutions of

2D Navier-Stokes Equation (and some other related equations), perturbed by a random force, proportional to the square root of the viscosity. I shall discuss some properties of the solutions, uniform in the viscosity, as well as the inviscid limit.

Hamiltonian Feynman path integrals, or Feynman (path) integrals over

trajectories in the phase space, are values, which some

pseudomeasures, usually called Feynman (pseudo)measures (they are

distributions, in the sense of the Sobolev-Schwartz theory), take on

functions defined on trajectories in the phase space; so such

functions are integrands in the Feynman path integrals. Hamiltonian

Feynman path integrals (and also Feynman path integrals over

trajectories in the configuration space) are used to get some

representations of solutions for Schroedinger type equations. In the

talk one plans to discuss the following problems.

We present a large deviation result for the behaviour of the

end-point of a diffusion under the influence of a strong drift. The rate

function can be explicitely determined for both attracting and repelling

drift. It transpires that this problem cannot be solved using

Freidlin-Wentzel theory alone. We present the main ideas of a proof which

is based on the Girsanov-Formula and Tauberian theorems of exponential type.

Let {X_n} be a sequence of bounded, real-valued random variables.

Assume that the partial-sums processes {S_n}, where S_n=X_1+...+X_n,

satisfies the large deviation principle with a convex rate-function, I().

Given an observation of the process {X_n}, how would you estimate I()? This

talk will introduce an estimator that was proposed to tackle a problem in

telecommunications and discuss it's properties. In particular, recent

results regarding the large deviations of estimating I() will be presented.

The significance of these results for the problem which originally motivated

the estimator, estimating the tails of queue-length distributions, will be

demonstrated. Open problems will be mentioned and a tenuous link to Oxford's

Mathematical Institute revealed.

Under the nondegenerate condition as in the diffusion case, we show

that the linear stochastic jump diffusion process projected on the

unite sphere has an uni que invariant probabolity measure. The

Lyapunov exponentcan be represented as an integral over the

sphere. These results were extended to the degenerated and Levy jump

cases.

Anderson localisation is an important phenomenon describing a

transition between insulation and conductivity. The problem is to analyse

the spectrum of a Schroedinger operator with a random potential in the

Euclidean space or on a lattice. We say that the system exhibits

(exponential) localisation if with probability one the spectrum is pure

point and the corresponding eigen-functions decay exponentially fast.

So far in the literature one considered a single-particle model where the

potential at different sites is IID or has a controlled decay of

correlations. The present talk aims at $N$-particle systems (bosons or

fermions) where the potential sums over different sites, and the traditional

approach needs serious modifications. The main result is that if the

`randomness' is strong enough, the $N$-particle system exhibits

localisation.

The proof exploits the muli-scale analysis scheme going back to Froehlich,

Martinelli, Scoppola and Spencer and refined by von Drefus and Klein. No

preliminary knowledge of the related material will be assumed from the

audience, apart from basic facts.

This is a joint work with V Chulaevsky (University of Reims, France)

I will present a new formula for diffusion processes which involving

Ito integral for the transition probability functions. The nature of

the formula I discovered is very close to the Kac formula, but its

form is similar to the Cameron-Martin formula. In some sense it is the

Cameron-Martin formula for pinned diffusions.

I will consider a stochastic process ( \xi_u; u \in

\Gamma_\infty ) where \Gamma_\infty is the set of vertices of an

infinite binary tree which satisfies some recursion relation

\xi_u= \phi(\xi_{u0},\xi_{u1}, \epsilon_u) \text { for each } u \in \Gamma_\infty.

Here u0 and u1 denote the two immediate daughters of the vertex u.

The random variables ( \epsilon_u; u\in \Gamma_\infty), which

are to be thought of as innovations, are supposed independent and

identically distributed. This type of structure is ubiquitous in models

coming from applied proability. A recent paper of Aldous and Bandyopadhyay

has drawn attention to the issue of endogeny: that is whether the process

( \xi_u; u \in \Gamma_\infty) is measurable with respect to the

innovations process. I will explain how this question is related to the

existence of certain dynamics and use this idea to develop a necessary and

sufficient condition [ at least if S is finite!] for endogeny in terms of

the coupling rate for a Markov chain on S^2 for which the diagonal is

absorbing.

We shall review recent progress in the understanding of

isoperimetric inequalities for product probability measures (a very tight

description of the concentration of measure phenomeonon). Several extensions

of the classical result for the Gaussian measure were recently derived by

functional analytic methods.

The Hopfield model took his name and its popularity within the theory

of formal neural networks. It was introduced in 1982 to describe and

implement associative memories. In fact, the mathematical model was

already defined, and studied in a simple form by Pastur and Figotin in

an attempt to describe spin-glasses, which are magnetic materials with

singular behaviour at low temperature. This model indeed shows a very

complex structure if considered in a slightly different regime than

the one they studied. In the present talk we will focus on the

fluctuations of the free energy in the high-temperature phase. No

prior knowledge of Statistical mechanics is required to follow the

talk.

Joe Doob, who died recently aged 94, was the last survivor of the

founding fathers of probability. Doob was best known for his work on

martingales, and for his classic book, Stochastic Processes (1953).

The talk will combine an appreciation of Doob's work and legacy with

reminiscences of Doob the man. (I was fortunate to be a colleague of

Doob from 1975-6, and to get to know him well during that year.)

Following Doob's passing, the mantle of greatest living probabilist

descends on the shoulders of Kiyosi Ito (b. 1915), alas now a sick

man.

We are interested in a microscopic stochastic description of a

population of discrete individuals characterized by one adaptive

trait. The population is modeled as a stochastic point process whose

generator captures the probabilistic dynamics over continuous time of

birth, mutation and death, as influenced by each individual's trait

values, and interactions between individuals. An offspring usually

inherits the trait values of her progenitor, except when a mutation

causes the offspring to take an instantaneous mutation step at birth

to new trait values. Once this point process is in place, the quest

for tractable approximations can follow different mathematical paths,

which differ in the normalization they assume (taking limit on

population size , rescaling time) and in the nature of the

corresponding approximation models: integro or integro-differential

equations, superprocesses. In particular cases, we consider the long

time behaviour for the stochastic or deterministic models.

Complete stochastic volatility models provide prices and

hedges. There are a number of complete models which jointly model an

underlying and one or more vanilla options written on it (for example

see Lyons, Schonbucher, Babbar and Davis). However, any consistent

model describing the volatility of options requires a complex

dependence of the volatility of the option on its strike. To date we

do not have a clear approach to selecting a model for the volatility

of these options

A version of Lyons theory of rough path calculus which applies to a

subclass of rough paths for which more geometric interpretations are

valid will be presented. Application will be made to the Brownian and

to the (fractional) support theorem.

The convergence to stationarity of many finite ergodic Markov

chains presents a sharp cut-off: there is a time T such that before

time T the chain is far from its equilibrium and, after time T,

equilibrium is essentially reached. We will discuss precise

definitions of the cut-off phenomenon, examples, and some partial

results and conjectures.