Studying the geometry generated by Gaussian and Gaussian-related random fields via their excursion sets is now a well-developed and well-understood subject. The purely non-Gaussian scenario has, however, not been studied at all. In this paper we look at three classes of stable random fields, and obtain asymptotic formulae for the mean values of various geometric characteristics of their excursion sets over high levels. While the formulae are asymptotic, they contain enough information to show that not only do stable random fields exhibit geometric behaviour very different from that of Gaussian fields, but they also differ significantly among themselves.

We investigate the degree sequence of the geometric preferential attachment model of Flaxman, Frieze and Vera (2006), (2007) in the case where the self-loop parameter α is set to 0. We show that, given certain conditions on the attractiveness function F, the degree sequence converges to the same sequence as found for standard preferential attachment in Bollobás et al. (2001). We also apply our method to the extended model introduced in van der Esker (2008) which allows for an initial attractiveness term, proving similar results.

Using the geometry of the Kendall shape space, in this paper we study the shape, as well as the size-and-shape, of the projection of a configuration after it has been rotated and, when the given configuration lies in a Euclidean space of an arbitrary dimension, we obtain expressions for the induced distributions of such shapes when the rotation is uniformly distributed.

In this paper we describe methods for randomly thinning certain classes of spatial point processes. In the case of a Markov point process, the proposed method involves a dependent thinning of a spatial birth-and-death process, where clans of ancestors associated with the original points are identified, and where we simulate backwards and forwards in order to obtain the thinned process. In the case of a Cox process, a simple independent thinning technique is proposed. In both cases, the thinning results in a Poisson process if and only if the true Papangelou conditional intensity is used, and, thus, can be used as a graphical exploratory tool for inspecting the goodness-of-fit of a spatial point process model. Several examples, including clustered and inhibitive point processes, are considered.

For a typical cell of a homogeneous Poisson-Voronoi tessellation in ℝd , it is shown that the variance of the volume of the intersection of the typical cell with any measurable subset of ℝd is bounded by the variance of the volume of the typical cell. It is also shown that the variance of the volume of the intersection of the typical cell with a translation of itself is bounded by four times the variance of the volume of the typical cell. These bounds are applied to show large-dimensional volume degeneracy as d tends to ∞. An extension to the kth nearest-point Poisson-Voronoi tessellation for k ≥ 2 is also considered.

We examine the long-time behavior of forward rates in the framework of Heath-Jarrow-Morton-Musiela models with infinite-dimensional Lévy noise. We give an explicit condition under which the rates have a mean reversion property. In a special case we show that this condition is fulfilled for any Lévy process with variance smaller than a given constant, depending only on the state space and the volatility.

For several pairs (P, Q) of classical distributions on ℕ0, we show that their stochastic ordering P ≤stQ can be characterized by their extreme tail ordering equivalent to P({k *})/Q({k *}) ≥ 1 ≥ limk→k* P({k})/Q({k}), with k * and k * denoting the minimum and the supremum of the support of P + Q, and with the limit to be read as P({k *})/Q({k *}) for finite k *. This includes in particular all pairs where P and Q are both binomial (b n1,p1 ≤stb n2,p2 if and only if n 1 ≤ n 2 and (1 - p 1)n1 ≥ (1 - p 2)n2 , or p 1 = 0), both negative binomial (b − r1,p1 ≤stb − r2,p2 if and only if p 1 ≥ p 2 and p 1 r1 ≥ p 2 r2 ), or both hypergeometric with the same sample size parameter. The binomial case is contained in a known result about Bernoulli convolutions, the other two cases appear to be new. The emphasis of this paper is on providing a variety of different methods of proofs: (i) half monotone likelihood ratios, (ii) explicit coupling, (iii) Markov chain comparison, (iv) analytic calculation, and (v) comparison of Lévy measures. We give four proofs in the binomial case (methods (i)-(iv)) and three in the negative binomial case (methods (i), (iv), and (v)). The statement for hypergeometric distributions is proved via method (i).

Asymptotic independence of the components of random vectors is a concept used in many applications. The standard criteria for checking asymptotic independence are given in terms of distribution functions (DFs). DFs are rarely available in an explicit form, especially in the multivariate case. Often we are given the form of the density or, via the shape of the data clouds, we can obtain a good geometric image of the asymptotic shape of the level sets of the density. In this paper we establish a simple sufficient condition for asymptotic independence for light-tailed densities in terms of this asymptotic shape. This condition extends Sibuya's classic result on asymptotic independence for Gaussian densities.

In this paper the theory of species sampling sequences is linked to the theory of conditionally identically distributed sequences in order to enlarge the set of species sampling sequences which are mathematically tractable. The conditional identity in distribution (see Berti, Pratelli and Rigo (2004)) is a new type of dependence for random variables, which generalizes the well-known notion of exchangeability. In this paper a class of random sequences, called generalized species sampling sequences, is defined and a condition to have conditional identity in distribution is given. Moreover, two types of generalized species sampling sequence that are conditionally identically distributed are introduced and studied: the generalized Poisson-Dirichlet sequence and the generalized Ottawa sequence. Some examples are discussed.

This paper gives easy proofs of conditional limit laws for the population size Z t of a critical Markov branching process whose offspring law is attracted to a stable law with index 1 + α, where 0 ≤ α ≤ 1. Conditioning events subsume the usual ones, and more general initial laws are considered. The case α = 0 is related to extreme value theory for the Gumbel law.

The stochastic Lagrange wave model is a realistic alternative to the Gaussian linear wave model, which has been successfully used in ocean engineering for more than half a century. In this paper we present the slope distributions and other characteristic distributions at level crossings for asymmetric Lagrange time waves, i.e. what can be observed at a fixed measuring station, thereby extending results previously given for space waves. The distributions are given as expectations in a multivariate normal distribution, and they have to be evaluated by simulation or numerical integration. Interesting characteristic variables are the slope in time, the slope in space, and the vertical particle velocity when the waves are observed close to instances when the water level crosses a predetermined level. The theory has been made possible by recent generalizations of Rice's formula for the expected number of marked crossings in random fields.

Contemporaneous aggregation of N independent copies of a random-coefficient AR(1) process with random coefficient a ∈ (−1, 1) and independent and identically distributed innovations belonging to the domain of attraction of an α-stable law (0 < α < 2) is discussed. We show that, under the normalization N 1/α, the limit aggregate exists, in the sense of weak convergence of finite-dimensional distributions, and is a mixed stable moving average as studied in Surgailis, Rosiński, Mandrekar and Cambanis (1993). We focus on the case where the slope coefficient a has probability density vanishing regularly at a = 1 with exponent b ∈ (0, α − 1) for α ∈ (1, 2). We show that in this case, the limit aggregate {X̅ t } exhibits long memory. In particular, for {X̅ t }, we investigate the decay of the codifference, the limit of partial sums, and the long-range dependence (sample Allen variance) property of Heyde and Yang (1997).

Consider a family of random ordered graph trees (T n )n≥1, where T n has n vertices. It has previously been established that if the associated search-depth processes converge to the normalised Brownian excursion when rescaled appropriately as n → ∞, then the simple random walks on the graph trees have the Brownian motion on the Brownian continuum random tree as their scaling limit. Here, this result is extended to demonstrate the existence of a diffusion scaling limit whenever the volume measure on the limiting real tree is nonatomic, supported on the leaves of the limiting tree, and satisfies a polynomial lower bound for the volume of balls. Furthermore, as an application of this generalisation, it is established that the simple random walks on a family of Galton-Watson trees with a critical infinite variance offspring distribution, conditioned on the total number of offspring, can be rescaled to converge to the Brownian motion on a related α-stable tree.

Consider the following classical problem in ad-hoc networks. Suppose that n devices are distributed uniformly at random in a given region. Each device is allowed to choose its own transmission radius, and two devices can communicate if and only if they are within the transmission radius of each other. The aim is to (quickly) establish a connected network of low average and maximum degree. In this paper we present the first efficient distributed protocols that, in poly-logarithmically many rounds and with high probability, set up a connected network with O(1) average degree and O(log n) maximum degree. Our algorithms are based on the following result, which is a nontrivial consequence of classical percolation theory. Suppose that each device sets up its transmission radius in order to reach the K closest devices. There exists a universal constant K (independent of n) such that, with high probability, there will be a unique giant component (i.e. a connected component of size Θ(n)). Furthermore, all remaining components will be of size O(log2 n). This leads to an efficient distributed probabilistic test for membership in the giant component, which can be used in a second phase to achieve full connectivity.

PageRank with personalization is used in Web search as an importance measure for Web documents. The goal of this paper is to characterize the tail behavior of the PageRank distribution in the Web and other complex networks characterized by power laws. To this end, we model the PageRank as a solution of a stochastic equation where the R i s are distributed as R. This equation is inspired by the original definition of the PageRank. In particular, N models the number of incoming links to a page, and B stays for the user preference. Assuming that N or B are heavy tailed, we employ the theory of regular variation to obtain the asymptotic behavior of R under quite general assumptions on the involved random variables. Our theoretical predictions show good agreement with experimental data.