Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

The projected normal distribution, with isotropic variance, on the 2-sphere is considered using intrinsic statistics. It is shown that in this case, the expectation commutes with the projection, and that the covariance of the normal variable has a 1-1 correspondence with the intrinsic covariance of the projected normal distribution. This allows us to estimate, after the model identification, the parameters of the underlying normal distribution that generates the data.

The paper is devoted to the study of the short rate equation of the form with deterministic functions $F,{G_{1}},\dots ,{G_{d}}$ and a multivariate Lévy process $Z=({Z_{1}},\dots ,{Z_{d}})$ with possibly dependent coordinates. This equation is assumed to have a nonnegative solution which generates an affine term structure model. Under some mild assumptions on the Lévy measure of Z it is shown that the same term structure is generated by an equation with affine drift term and noise being a one-dimensional α-stable process with index of stability $\alpha \in (1,2)$. For this case the shape of possible simple forward curves is characterized. A precise description of normal, inverse and humped profiles in terms of the equation coefficients and the stability index α is provided.

In this paper, new closed form formulae for moments of the (generalized) Student’s t-distribution are derived in the one dimensional case as well as in higher dimensions through a unified probability framework. Interestingly, the closed form expressions for the moments of the Student’s t-distribution can be written in terms of the familiar Gamma function, Kummer’s confluent hypergeometric function, and the hypergeometric function. This work aims to provide a concise and unified treatment of the moments for this important distribution.

The expected exit time from the interval $[-1,1]$ is investigated for an autoregressive process defined recursively by Here, ε is a small positive parameter, $f:\mathbb{R}\mapsto \mathbb{R}$ is usually a contractive function and ${\{{\xi _{n}}\}_{n\ge 1}}$ is a sequence of i.i.d. random variables. In this paper, previous results for a linear function $f(x)=ax$ are extended to more general cases, with the main focus on piecewise linear functions.