Minimal auxiliary Markov chains through sequential elimination of states

When using an auxiliary Markov chain to compute the distribution of a pattern statistic, the computational complexity is directly related to the number of Markov chain states. Theory related to minimal deterministic finite automata have been applied to large state spaces to reduce the number of Markov chain states so that only a minimal set remains. In this paper, a characterization of equivalent states is given so that extraneous states are deleted during the process of forming the state space, improving computational efficiency. The theory extends the applicability of Markov chain based methods for computing the distribution of pattern statistics.     

A Bayesian approach for misclassified ordinal response data

ABSTRACT

Motivated by a longitudinal oral health study, the Signal-Tandmobiel^® study, a Bayesian approach has been developed to model misclassified ordinal response data. Two regression models have been considered to incorporate misclassification in the categorical response. Specifically, probit and logit models have been developed. The computational difficulties have been avoided by using data augmentation. This idea is exploited to derive efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Although the method is proposed for ordered categories, it can also be implemented for unordered ones in a simple way. The model performance is shown through a simulation-based example and the analysis of the motivating study.     

Framework for Microbial Food‐Safety Risk Assessments Amenable to Bayesian Modeling

Regulatory agencies often perform microbial risk assessments to evaluate the change in the number of human illnesses as the result of a new policy that reduces the level of contamination in the food supply. These agencies generally have regulatory authority over the production and retail sectors of the farm‐to‐table continuum. Any predicted change in contamination that results from new policy that regulates production practices occurs many steps prior to consumption of the product. This study proposes a framework for conducting microbial food‐safety risk assessments; this framework can be used to quantitatively assess the annual effects of national regulatory policies. Advantages of the framework are that estimates of human illnesses are consistent with national disease surveillance data (which are usually summarized on an annual basis) and some of the modeling steps that occur between production and consumption can be collapsed or eliminated. The framework leads to probabilistic models that include uncertainty and variability in critical input parameters; these models can be solved using a number of different Bayesian methods. The Bayesian synthesis method performs well for this application and generates posterior distributions of parameters that are relevant to assessing the effect of implementing a new policy. An example, based on Campylobacter and chicken, estimates the annual number of illnesses avoided by a hypothetical policy; this output could be used to assess the economic benefits of a new policy. Empirical validation of the policy effect is also examined by estimating the annual change in the numbers of illnesses observed via disease surveillance systems.     

Bootstrap maximum likelihood for quasi-stationary distributions

Quasi-stationary distributions have many applications in diverse research fields. We develop a bootstrap-based maximum likelihood (BML) method to deal with quasi-stationary distributions in statistical inference. To efficiently implement a bootstrap procedure that can handle the dependence among observations and speed up the computation, a novel block bootstrap algorithm is proposed to accommodate parallel bootstrap. In particular, we select a suitable block length for use with the parallel bootstrap. The estimation error is investigated to show its convergence. The proposed BML is shown to be asymptotically unbiased. Some numerical studies are given to examine the performance of the new algorithm. The advantages are evidenced through a comparison with some competitors and some examples are analysed for illustration.     

Extending Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation to a Class of Near‐Gaussian Latent Models

This work extends the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) method to latent models outside the scope of latent Gaussian models, where independent components of the latent field can have a near‐Gaussian distribution. The proposed methodology is an essential component of a bigger project that aims to extend the R package INLA in order to allow the user to add flexibility and challenge the Gaussian assumptions of some of the model components in a straightforward and intuitive way. Our approach is applied to two examples, and the results are compared with that obtained by Markov chain Monte Carlo, showing similar accuracy with only a small fraction of computational time. Implementation of the proposed extension is available in the R‐INLA package.     

The variance constant for continuous-time level dependent quasi-birth-and-death processes

We derive the variance constant of continuous-time level dependent quasi-birth-and-death processes by investigating the expected integral functionals of the first return times. As an application, we consider the variance constant for the M/M/c retrial queue with non-persistent customers. For this model, analytical expressions and numerical results are obtained for the cases of single server and multiple servers, respectively. We also apply the obtained result to test the M/M/c vacation model for airport security pre-board screening checkpoint services by constructing a confidence interval for the mean queue length.     

Exact Estimation of Demand Functions under Block-Rate Pricing

This article proposes an exact estimation of demand functions under block-rate pricing by focusing on increasing block-rate pricing. This is the first study that explicitly considers the separability condition which has been ignored in previous literature. Under this pricing structure, the price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a piecewise-linear budget constraint. Solving this maximization problem leads to a statistical model in which model parameters are strongly restricted by the separability condition. In this article, by taking a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to properly estimate the demand function. We find, however, that the convergence of the distribution of simulated samples to the posterior distribution is slow, requiring an additional scale transformation step for parameters to the Gibbs sampler. These proposed methods are then applied to estimate the Japanese residential water demand function.     

On the Exponential Decay Rate of the Tail of a Discrete Probability Distribution

Abstract

We give a sufficient condition for the exponential decay of the tail of a discrete probability distribution π = (π _n ) _n≥0 in the sense that lim _n→∞(1/n) log∑ _i>n π _i  = ?θ with 0 < θ < ∞. We focus on analytic properties of the probability generating function of a discrete probability distribution, especially, the radius of convergence and the number of poles on the circle of convergence. Furthermore, we give an example of an M/G/1 type Markov chain such that the tail of its stationary distribution does not decay exponentially.     

A stochastic model of cyber attacks with imperfect detection

Abstract

This paper introduces a cyber security model with imperfect detection, in which one attacker launches multiple attacks against the target with adjusted strength based on the previous attacking outcome. Several sufficient conditions leading to the usual stochastic order on the first time to observe a truly compromised target, to observe a successful attack and to compromise the target are developed, respectively. The probability for the target to be truly compromised before observing some number of successful attacks is proved to increase (decrease) in the attacking (defense) strength. Monte Carlo simulations are also conducted to empirically illustrate the theoretical results.     

Modeling the Dependence of Conditional Correlations on Market Volatility

Several models have been developed to capture the dynamics of the conditional correlations between time series of financial returns and several studies have shown that the market volatility is a major determinant of the correlations. We extend some models to include explicitly the dependence of the correlations on the market volatility. The models differ by the way—linear or nonlinear, direct or indirect—in which the volatility influences the correlations. Using a wide set of models with two measures of market volatility on two datasets, we find that for some models, the empirical results support to some extent the statistical significance and the economic significance of the volatility effect on the correlations, but the presence of the volatility effect does not improve the forecasting performance of the extended models. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.