Stochastic Processes And Models In Operations Research

Sample

J. Michael Steele

This book is designed for students who want to develop professional skills in stochastic calculus and its application to problems in finance. The Wharton School course on which the book is based is designed for energetic students who have had some experience with probability and statistics, but who have not had advanced courses in stochastic processes. Even though the course assumes only a modest background, it moves quickly and - in the end - students can expect to have the tools that are deep enough and rich enough to be relied upon throughout their professional careers. The course begins with simple random walk and the analysis of gambling games. This material is used to motivate the theory of martingales, and, after reaching a decent level of confidence with discrete processes, the course takes up the more demanding development of continuous time stochastic process, especially Brownian motion. The construction of Brownian motion is given in detail, and enough material on the subtle properties of Brownian paths is developed so that the student should sense of when intuition can be trusted and when it cannot. The course then takes up the Itô integral and aims to provide a development that is honest and complete without being pedantic. With the Itô integral in hand, the course focuses more on models. Stochastic processes of importance in Finance and Economics are developed in concert with the tools of stochastic calculus that are needed in order to solve problems of practical importance. The financial notion of replication is developed, and the Black-Scholes PDE is derived by three different methods. The course then introduces enough of the theory of the diffusion equation to be able to solve the Black-Scholes PDE and prove the uniqueness of the solution.

Sample

Anatoly Swishchuk, Jianhong Wu

This is a new book in biomathematics, which includes new models of stochastic non-linear biological systems and new results for these systems. These results are based on the new results for non-linear difference and differential equations in random media. This book contains: -New stochastic non-linear models of biological systems, such as biological systems in random media: epidemic, genetic selection, demography, branching, logistic growth and predator-prey models; -New results for scalar and vector difference equations in random media with applications to the stochastic biological systems in 1); -New results for stochastic non-linear biological systems, such as averaging, merging, diffusion approximation, normal deviations and stability; -New approach to the study of stochastic biological systems in random media such as random evolution approach.

Sample

R.B. Bapat

Linear Algebra and Linear Models comprises a concise and rigorous introduction to linear algebra required for statistics followed by the basic aspects of the theory of linear estimation and hypothesis testing. The emphasis is on the approach using generalized inverses. Topics such as the multivariate normal distribution and distribution of quadratic forms are included. For this third edition, the material has been reorganised to develop the linear algebra in the first six chapters, to serve as a first course on linear algebra that is especially suitable for students of statistics or for those looking for a matrix theoretic approach to the subject. Other key features include: • coverage of topics such as rank additivity, inequalities for eigenvalues and singular values; • a new chapter on linear mixed models; • over seventy additional problems on rank: the matrix rank is an important and rich topic with connections to many aspects of linear algebra such as generalized inverses, idempotent matrices and partitioned matrices. This text is aimed primarily at advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate students taking courses in linear algebra, linear models, multivariate analysis and design of experiments. A wealth of exercises, complete with hints and solutions, help to consolidate understanding. Researchers in mathematics and statistics will also find the book a useful source of results and problems.

Sample

Jean-Bernard Lasserre

"Many important applications in global optimization, algebra, probability and statistics, applied mathematics, control theory, financial mathematics, inverse problems, etc. can be modeled as a particular instance of the Generalized Moment Problem (GMP). This book introduces a new general methodology to solve the GMP when its data are polynomials and basic semi-algebraic sets. This methodology combines semidefinite programming with recent results from real algebraic geometry to provide a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations converging to the desired optimal value. Applied on appropriate cones, standard duality in convex optimization nicely expresses the duality between moments and positive polynomials. In the second part, the methodology is particularized and described in detail for various applications, including global optimization, probability, optimal control, mathematical finance, multivariate integration, etc., and examples are provided for each particular application." -- Book cover