Propagation of chaos for interacting particles subject to environmental noise

A system of interacting particles described by stochastic differential equations is considered. As oppopsed to the usual model, where the noise perturbations acting on different particles are independent, here the particles are subject to the same space-dependent noise, similar to the (noninteracting) particles of the theory of diffusion of passive scalars. We prove a result of propagation of chaos and show that the limit PDE is stochastic and of inviscid type, as opposed to the case when independent noises drive the different particles.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AAP1120 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Genealogical particle analysis of rare events

In this paper an original interacting particle system approach is developed for studying Markov chains in rare event regimes. The proposed particle system is theoretically studied through a genealogical tree interpretation of Feynman--Kac path measures. The algorithmic implementation of the particle system is presented. An estimator for the probability of occurrence of a rare event is proposed and its variance is computed, which allows to compare and to optimize different versions of the algorithm. Applications and numerical implementations are discussed. First, we apply the particle system technique to a toy model (a Gaussian random walk), which permits to illustrate the theoretical predictions. Second, we address a physically relevant problem consisting in the estimation of the outage probability due to polarization-mode dispersion in optical fibers.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000566 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

NASA Thesaurus supplement: A four part cumulative supplement to the 1988 edition of the NASA Thesaurus (supplement 3)

The four-part cumulative supplement to the 1988 edition of the NASA Thesaurus includes the Hierarchical Listing (Part 1), Access Vocabulary (Part 2), Definitions (Part 3), and Changes (Part 4). The semiannual supplement gives complete hierarchies and accepted upper/lowercase forms for new terms