I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Levy processes form a wide and rich class of random process, and have many applications ranging from physics to finance Stochastic calculus is the mathematics of systems interacting with random noise Here, the author ties these two subjects together, beginning with an introduction to the general theory of Levy processes, then leading on to develop the stochastic calculus for Levy processes in a direct and accessible way This fully revised edition now features a number of new topics These include: regular variation and subexponential distributions; necessary and sufficient conditions for Levy processes to have finite moments; characterisation of Levy processes with finite variation; Kunita's estimates for moments of Levy type stochastic integrals; new proofs of Ito representation and martingale representation theorems for general Levy processes; multiple Wiener-Levy integrals and chaos decomposition; an introduction to Malliavin calculus; an introduction to stability theory for Levy-driven SDEs

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Lévy Processes and Stochastic Calculus

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

Optimal transport (OT) theory can be informally described using the words of the French mathematician Gaspard Monge (1746-1818): A worker with a shovel in hand has to move a large pile of sand lying on a construction site. The goal of the worker is to erect with all that sand a target pile with a prescribed shape (for example, that of a giant sand castle). Naturally, the worker wishes to minimize her total effort, quantified for instance as the total distance or time spent carrying shovelfuls of sand. Mathematicians interested in OT cast that problem as that of comparing two probability distributions, two different piles of sand of the same volume. They consider all of the many possible ways to morph, transport or reshape the first pile into the second, and associate a "global" cost to every such transport, using the "local" consideration of how much it costs to move a grain of sand from one place to another. Recent years have witnessed the spread of OT in several fields, thanks to the emergence of approximate solvers that can scale to sizes and dimensions that are relevant to data sciences. Thanks to this newfound scalability, OT is being increasingly used to unlock various problems in imaging sciences (such as color or texture processing), computer vision and graphics (for shape manipulation) or machine learning (for regression, classification and density fitting). This short book reviews OT with a bias toward numerical methods and their applications in data sciences, and sheds lights on the theoretical properties of OT that make it particularly useful for some of these applications.

Computational Optimal Transport

Stochastic differential equations and diffusion processes

Let $$\mu _N$$
 be the empirical measure associated to a $$N$$
 -sample of a given probability distribution $$\mu $$
 on $$\mathbb {R}^d$$
 . We are interested in the rate of convergence of $$\mu _N$$
 to $$\mu $$
 , when measured in the Wasserstein distance of order $$p>0$$
 . We provide some satisfying non-asymptotic $$L^p$$
 -bounds and concentration inequalities, for any values of $$p>0$$
 and $$d\ge 1$$
 . We extend also the non asymptotic $$L^p$$
 -bounds to stationary $$\rho $$
 -mixing sequences, Markov chains, and to some interacting particle systems.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00915365/document

On the rate of convergence in Wasserstein distance of the empirical measure

Let $\mu_N$ be the empirical measure associated to a $N$-sample of a given probability distribution $\mu$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We are interested in the rate of convergence of $\mu_N$ to $\mu$, when measured in the Wasserstein distance of order $p>0$. We provide some satisfying non-asymptotic $L^p$-bounds and concentration inequalities, for any values of $p>0$ and $d\geq 1$. We extend also the non asymptotic $L^p$-bounds to stationary $\rho$-mixing sequences, Markov chains, and to some interacting particle systems.

The existence of self-similar solutions to Smoluchowski’s coagulation equation has been conjectured for several years by physicists, and numerical simulations have confirmed the validity of this conjecture. Still, there was no existence result up to now, except for the constant and additive kernels for which explicit formulae are available. In this paper, the existence of self-similar solutions decaying rapidly at infinity is established for a wide class of homogeneous coagulation kernels.

http://www.proba.jussieu.fr/pageperso/fournier/a26.pdf

Existence of Self-Similar Solutions to Smoluchowski’s Coagulation Equation

We generalise the construction of multivariate Hawkes processes to a possibly infinite network of counting processes on a directed graph G. The process is constructed as the solution to a system of Poisson driven stochastic differential equations, for which we prove pathwise existence and uniqueness under some reasonable conditions. We next investigate how to approximate a standard N -dimensional Hawkes process by a simple inhomogeneous Poisson process in the mean-field framework where each pair of individuals interact in the same way, in the limit N → ∞. In the so-called linear case for the interaction, we further investigate the large time behaviour of the process. We study in particular the stability of the central limit theorem when exchanging the limits N, T → ∞ and exhibit different possible behaviours. We finally consider the case G = Z d with nearest neighbour interactions. In the linear case, we prove some (large time) laws of large numbers and exhibit different behaviours, reminiscent of the infinite setting. Finally we study the propagation of a single impulsion started at a given point of Z d at time 0. We compute the probability of extinction of such an impulsion and, in some particular cases, we can accurately describe how it propagates to the whole space. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 60F05, 60G55, 60G57.

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Hawkes processes on large networks

We consider a stochastic system of $N$ particles, usually called vortices in that setting, approximating the 2D Navier-Stokes equation written in vorticity. Assuming that the initial distribution of the position and circulation of the vortices has finite (partial) entropy and a finite moment of positive order, we show that the empirical measure of the particle system converges in law to the unique (under suitable a priori estimates) solution of the 2D Navier-Stokes equation. We actually prove a slightly stronger result : the propagation of chaos of the stochastic paths towards the solution of the expected nonlinear stochastic differential equation. Moreover, the convergence holds in a strong sense, usually called entropic (there is no loss of entropy in the limit). The result holds without restriction (but positivity) on the viscosity parameter. The main difficulty is the presence of the singular Biot-Savart kernel in the equation. To overcome this problem, we use the dissipation of entropy which provides some (uniform in $N$) bound on the Fisher information of the particle system, and then use extensively that bound together with classical and new properties of the Fisher information.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00762286/document

Nicolas Fournier

Papers

On the rate of convergence in Wasserstein distance of the empirical measure

On the rate of convergence in Wasserstein distance of the empirical measure

Existence of Self-Similar Solutions to Smoluchowski’s Coagulation Equation

Hawkes processes on large networks

Propagation of chaos for the 2D viscous vortex model