0000000000162498
AUTHOR
Lasse Leskelä
Hard-Core Thinnings of Germ‒Grain Models with Power-Law Grain Sizes
Random sets with long-range dependence can be generated using a Boolean model with power-law grain sizes. We study thinnings of such Boolean models which have the hard-core property that no grains overlap in the resulting germ‒grain model. A fundamental question is whether long-range dependence is preserved under such thinnings. To answer this question, we study four natural thinnings of a Poisson germ‒grain model where the grains are spheres with a regularly varying size distribution. We show that a thinning which favors large grains preserves the slow correlation decay of the original model, whereas a thinning which favors small grains does not. Our most interesting finding concerns the c…
A dilution test for the convergence of subseries of a monotone series
Cauchy's condensation test allows to determine the convergence of a monotone series by looking at a weighted subseries that only involves terms of the original series indexed by the powers of two. It is natural to ask whether the converse is also true: Is it possible to determine the convergence of an arbitrary subseries of a monotone series by looking at a suitably weighted version of the original series? In this note we show that the answer is affirmative and introduce a new convergence test particularly designed for this purpose.
Stochastic order characterization of uniform integrability and tightness
We show that a family of random variables is uniformly integrable if and only if it is stochastically bounded in the increasing convex order by an integrable random variable. This result is complemented by proving analogous statements for the strong stochastic order and for power-integrable dominating random variables. Especially, we show that whenever a family of random variables is stochastically bounded by a p-integrable random variable for some p>1, there is no distinction between the strong order and the increasing convex order. These results also yield new characterizations of relative compactness in Wasserstein and Prohorov metrics.
Conditional convex orders and measurable martingale couplings
Strassen's classical martingale coupling theorem states that two real-valued random variables are ordered in the convex (resp.\ increasing convex) stochastic order if and only if they admit a martingale (resp.\ submartingale) coupling. By analyzing topological properties of spaces of probability measures equipped with a Wasserstein metric and applying a measurable selection theorem, we prove a conditional version of this result for real-valued random variables conditioned on a random element taking values in a general measurable space. We also provide an analogue of the conditional martingale coupling theorem in the language of probability kernels and illustrate how this result can be appli…
Juggler's exclusion process
Juggler's exclusion process describes a system of particles on the positive integers where particles drift down to zero at unit speed. After a particle hits zero, it jumps into a randomly chosen unoccupied site. We model the system as a set-valued Markov process and show that the process is ergodic if the family of jump height distributions is uniformly integrable. In a special case where the particles jump according to a set-avoiding memoryless distribution, the process reaches its equilibrium in finite nonrandom time, and the equilibrium distribution can be represented as a Gibbs measure conforming to a linear gravitational potential.