Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

Sufficient conditions are given for the existence of a unique bounded in the mean solution to a second-order difference equation with jumps of operator coefficients in a Banach space. The question of the proximity of this solution to the stationary solution of the corresponding difference equation with constant operator coefficients is studied.

In this study, we consider a bias reduction of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters of a Gaussian second-order moving average (MA(2)) model. In many cases, we use the maximum likelihood estimator because the estimator is consistent. However, when the sample size n is small, the error is large because it has a bias of $O({n^{-1}})$. Furthermore, the exact form of the maximum likelihood estimator for moving average models is slightly complicated even for Gaussian models. We sometimes rely on simpler maximum likelihood estimation methods. As one of the methods, we focus on the conditional maximum likelihood estimator and examine the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimator for a Gaussian MA(2) model. Moreover, we propose new estimators for the unknown parameters of the Gaussian MA(2) model based on the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators. By performing simulations, we investigate properties of this bias, as well as the asymptotic variance of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters. Finally, we confirm the validity of the new estimators through this simulation study.

Probabilistic properties of vantage point trees are studied. A vp-tree built from a sequence of independent identically distributed points in ${[-1,\hspace{0.1667em}1]^{d}}$ with the ${\ell _{\infty }}$-distance function is considered. The length of the leftmost path in the tree, as well as partitions over the space it produces are analyzed. The results include several convergence theorems regarding these characteristics, as the number of nodes in the tree tends to infinity.