There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Convergence of Probability Measures. By P. Billingsley. Chichester, Sussex, Wiley, 1968. xii, 253 p. 9 1/4“. 117s.

Convergence of Probability Measures

The author's preface gives an outline: "This book is about weakconvergence methods in metric spaces, with applications sufficient to show their power and utility. The Introduction motivates the definitions and indicates how the theory will yield solutions to problems arising outside it. Chapter 1 sets out the basic general theorems, which are then specialized in Chapter 2 to the space C[0, l ] of continuous functions on the unit interval and in Chapter 3 to the space D [0, 1 ] of functions with discontinuities of the first kind. The results of the first three chapters are used in Chapter 4 to derive a variety of limit theorems for dependent sequences of random variables. " The book develops and expands on Donsker's 1951 and 1952 papers on the invariance principle and empirical distributions. The basic random variables remain real-valued although, of course, measures on C[0, l ] and D[0, l ] are vitally used. Within this framework, there are various possibilities for a different and apparently better treatment of the material. More of the general theory of weak convergence of probabilities on separable metric spaces would be useful. Metrizability of the convergence is not brought up until late in the Appendix. The close relation of the Prokhorov metric and a metric for convergence in probability is (hence) not mentioned (see V. Strassen, Ann. Math. Statist. 36 (1965), 423-439; the reviewer, ibid. 39 (1968), 1563-1572). This relation would illuminate and organize such results as Theorems 4.1, 4.2 and 4.4 which give isolated, ad hoc connections between weak convergence of measures and nearness in probability. In the middle of p. 16, it should be noted that C*(S) consists of signed measures which need only be finitely additive if 5 is not compact. On p. 239, where the author twice speaks of separable subsets having nonmeasurable cardinal, he means "discrete" rather than "separable." Theorem 1.4 is Ulam's theorem that a Borel probability on a complete separable metric space is tight. Theorem 1 of Appendix 3 weakens completeness to topological completeness. After mentioning that probabilities on the rationals are tight, the author says it is an

Convergence of probability measures

We explore in this chapter questions of existence and uniqueness for solutions to stochastic differential equations and offer a study of their properties. This endeavor is really a study of diffusion processes. Loosely speaking, the term diffusion is attributed to a Markov process which has continuous sample paths and can be characterized in terms of its infinitesimal generator.

Stochastic Differential Equations

Preface to the revised edition Remarks on notation 1. Basic examples 2. Characterization and existence 3. Stable processes and their extensions 4. The Levy-Ito decomposition of sample functions 5. Distributional properties of Levy processes 6. Subordination and density transformation 7. Recurrence and transience 8. Potential theory for Levy processes 9. Wiener-Hopf factorizations 10. More distributional properties Supplement Solutions to exercises References and author index Subject index.

Lévy processes and infinitely divisible distributions

We propose an interacting particle system to model the evolution of a system of banks with mutual exposures. In this model, a bank defaults when its normalized asset value hits a lower threshold, and its default causes instantaneous losses to other banks, possibly triggering a cascade of defaults. The strength of this interaction is determined by the level of the so-called noncore exposure. We show that, when the size of the system becomes large, the cumulative loss process of a bank resulting from the defaults of other banks exhibits discontinuities. These discontinuities are naturally interpreted as systemic events, and we characterize them explicitly in terms of the level of noncore exposure and the fraction of banks that are “about to default.” The main mathematical challenges of our work stem from the very singular nature of the interaction between the particles, which is inherited by the limiting system. A similar particle system is analyzed in [Ann. Appl. Probab. 25 (2015) 2096–2133] and [Stochastic Process. Appl. 125 (2015) 2451–2492], and we build on and extend their results. In particular, we characterize the large-population limit of the system and analyze the jump times, the regularity between jumps, and the local uniqueness of the limiting process.

Particle systems with singular interaction through hitting times: Application in systemic risk modeling

We determine rates of convergence of rank-based interacting diffusions and semimartingale reflecting Brownian motions to equilibrium. Bounds on fluctuations of additive functionals are obtained using Transportation Cost-Information inequalities for Markov processes. We work out various applications to the rank-based abstract equity markets used in Stochastic Portfolio Theory. For example, we produce quantitative bounds, including constants, for fluctuations of market weights and occupation times of various ranks for individual coordinates. Another important application is the comparison of performance between symmetric functionally generated portfolios and the market portfolio. This produces estimates of probabilities of “beating the market”.

Convergence rates for rank-based models with applications to portfolio theory

We study systems of Brownian particles on the real line, which interact by splitting the local times of collisions among themselves in an asymmetric manner. We prove the strong existence and uniqueness of such processes and identify them with the collections of ordered processes in a Brownian particle system, in which the drift coefficients, the diffusion coefficients, and the collision local times for the individual particles are assigned according to their ranks. These Brownian systems can be viewed as generalizations of those arising in first-order models for equity markets in the context of stochastic portfolio theory, and are able to correct for several shortcomings of such models while being equally amenable to computations. We also show that, in addition to being of interest in their own right, such systems of Brownian particles arise as universal scaling limits of systems of jump processes on the integer lattice with local interactions. A key step in the proof is the analysis of a generalization of Skorokhod maps which include `local times' at the intersection of faces of the nonnegative orthant. The result extends the convergence of TASEP to its continuous analogue. Finally, we identify those among the Brownian particle systems which have a probabilistic structure of determinantal type.

Systems of Brownian particles with asymmetric collisions

We consider finite and infinite systems of particles on the real line and half-line evolving in continuous time. Hereby, the particles are driven by i.i.d. L\'{e}vy processes endowed with rank-dependent drift and diffusion coefficients. In the finite systems we show that the processes of gaps in the respective particle configurations possess unique invariant distributions and prove the convergence of the gap processes to the latter in the total variation distance, assuming a bound on the jumps of the L\'{e}vy processes. In the infinite case we show that the gap process of the particle system on the half-line is tight for appropriate initial conditions and same drift and diffusion coefficients for all particles. Applications of such processes include the modeling of capital distributions among the ranked participants in a financial market, the stability of certain stochastic queueing and storage networks and the study of the Sherrington--Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses.

Competing particle systems evolving by interacting L\'{e}vy processes

We introduce multilevel versions of Dyson Brownian motions of arbitrary parameter $$\beta >0$$
 , generalizing the interlacing reflected Brownian motions of Warren for $$\beta =2$$
 . Such processes unify $$\beta $$
 corners processes and Dyson Brownian motions in a single object. Our approach is based on the approximation by certain multilevel discrete Markov chains of independent interest, which are defined by means of Jack symmetric polynomials. In particular, this approach allows to show that the levels in a multilevel Dyson Brownian motion are intertwined (at least for $$\beta \ge 1$$
 ) and to give the corresponding link explicitly.

/pdf/multilevel-dyson-brownian-motions-via-jack-polynomials-qf9rohukmn.pdf

Mykhaylo Shkolnikov

Papers

Particle systems with singular interaction through hitting times: Application in systemic risk modeling

Convergence rates for rank-based models with applications to portfolio theory

Systems of Brownian particles with asymmetric collisions

Competing particle systems evolving by interacting L\'{e}vy processes

Multilevel Dyson Brownian motions via Jack polynomials