The almost-sure asymptotic behavior of the solution to the stochastic heat equation with L\'evy noise

We examine the almost-sure asymptotics of the solution to the stochastic heat equation driven by a L\'evy space-time white noise. When a spatial point is fixed and time tends to infinity, we show that the solution develops unusually high peaks over short time intervals, even in the case of additive noise, which leads to a breakdown of an intuitively expected strong law of large numbers. More precisely, if we normalize the solution by an increasing nonnegative function, we either obtain convergence to $0$, or the limit superior and/or inferior will be infinite. A detailed analysis of the jumps further reveals that the strong law of large numbers can be recovered on discrete sequences of time points increasing to infinity. This leads to a necessary and sufficient condition that depends on the L\'evy measure of the noise and the growth and concentration properties of the sequence at the same time. Finally, we show that our results generalize to the stochastic heat equation with a multiplicative nonlinearity that is bounded away from zero and infinity.Comment: Forthcoming in The Annals of Probabilit

A note on a maximal Bernstein inequality

We show somewhat unexpectedly that whenever a general Bernstein-type maximal inequality holds for partial sums of a sequence of random variables, a maximal form of the inequality is also valid.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/10-BEJ304 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

The limit distribution of ratios of jumps and sums of jumps of subordinators

Let $V_{t}$ be a driftless subordinator, and let denote $m_{t}^{(1)} \geq m_{t}^{(2)} \geq\ldots$ its jump sequence on interval $[0,t]$. Put $V_{t}^{(k)} = V_{t} - m_{t}^{(1)} - \ldots- m_{t}^{(k)}$ for the $k$-trimmed subordinator. In this note we characterize under what conditions the limiting distribution of the ratios $V_{t}^{(k)} / m_{t}^{(k+1)}$ and $m_{t}^{(k+1)} / m_{t}^{(k)}$ exist, as $t \downarrow0$ or $t \to\infty$.Comment: 14 page

Couplings and Strong Approximations to Time Dependent Empirical Processes Based on I.I.D. Fractional Brownian Motions

We define a time dependent empirical process based on $n$ i.i.d.~fractional Brownian motions and establish Gaussian couplings and strong approximations to it by Gaussian processes. They lead to functional laws of the iterated logarithm for this process.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Theoretical Probability. 37 pages. Corrected version. The results on quantile processes are taken out and it will appear elsewher

Asymptotic behavior of the generalized St. Petersburg sum conditioned on its maximum

In this paper, we revisit the classical results on the generalized St. Petersburg sums. We determine the limit distribution of the St. Petersburg sum conditioning on its maximum, and we analyze how the limit depends on the value of the maximum. As an application, we obtain an infinite sum representation of the distribution function of the possible semistable limits. In the representation, each term corresponds to a given maximum, in particular this result explains that the semistable behavior is caused by the typical values of the maximum.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/14-BEJ685 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm