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A dichotomy for sampling barrier-crossing events of random walks with regularly varying tails

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2017

A. B. Dieker*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Guido R. Lagos*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Chile
*
* Postal address: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
** Postal address: Center for Mathematical Modeling, Universidad de Chile, Beauchef 851, Torre Norte oficina 705, Santiago, RM 8370456, Chile. Email address: guido.lagos.barrios@gmail.com

Abstract

We study how to sample paths of a random walk up to the first time it crosses a fixed barrier, in the setting where the step sizes are independent and identically distributed with negative mean and have a regularly varying right tail. We introduce a desirable property for a change of measure to be suitable for exact simulation. We study whether the change of measure of Blanchet and Glynn (2008) satisfies this property and show that it does so if and only if the tail index α of the right tail lies in the interval (1, 3/2).

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2017 

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