N-H bond activation by palladium(ii) and copper(i) complexes featuring a reactive bidentate PN-ligand

The first examples of reactivity at the backbone of a bidentate PN-ligand L1H relevant to N-H activation are described, leading to novel Pd(II) and Cu(I) amido complexes. Activation of the PN-ligand backbone led to selective dearomatization of the pyridyl ring structure. In the case of Pd(II), the intermediate could be efficiently stabilized using PMe(3). Selective N-H bond cleavage of e.g. trifluorosulfonylamide resulted in facile formation of mononuclear metal-amido species 2 and 4, which have been crystallographically characterized. Hydrogen-bonding dimerization is observed in these solid state structures. The results obtained with these structurally versatile and reactive scaffolds likely open up new avenues in cooperative catalysis.     

The vanishing of a higher codimension analogue of Hochster’s theta invariant

We study H. Dao’s invariant ${\eta_c^R}$ of pairs of modules defined over a complete intersection ring R of codimension c having an isolated singularity. Our main result is that ${\eta_c^R}$ vanishes for all pairs of modules when R is a graded complete intersection ring of codimension c > 1 having an isolated singularity. A consequence of this result is that all pairs of modules over such a ring are c-Tor-rigid.     

A Zero Divisor Graph Determined by Equivalence Classes of Zero Divisors

We study the zero divisor graph determined by equivalence classes of zero divisors of a commutative Noetherian ring R. We demonstrate how to recover information about R from this structure. In particular, we determine how to identify associated primes from the graph.     

Parseval Frames Built Up from Generalized Shift-Invariant Systems

Wavelet systems, and many of its generalizations such as wavelet packets, shearlets, and composite dilation wavelets are generalized shift-invariant systems (GSI) in the sense of the work by Ron and Shen. It is well known that a wavelet system is never Z-shift invariant (SI). Nevertheless, one can modify it and construct a Z-SI system, called a quasi-affine system, which shares most of the frame properties of the wavelet system. The analogue of a quasi-affine system for a GSI system is called an oblique oversampling: it is shift invariant with respect to a fixed lattice. Assumptions on a GSI system X were given by Ron and Shen to ensure that any oblique oversampling is a Parseval frame for ${L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ whenever X is. We show that these assumptions are not satisfied for some of the wavelet generalizations mentioned above and that elements implicit in their work provide other sufficient conditions on the system under which any oblique oversampling is a Parseval frame for ${L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ (shift invariant with respect to a fixed lattice). Moreover, in the orthonormal setting it is shown that completeness yields a shift-invariant Parseval frame for suitable proper subspaces of ${L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ , too.     

Stable weakly shadowable volume-preserving systems are volume-hyperbolic

We prove that any C1-stable weakly shadowable volume-preserving diffeomorphism defined on a compact manifold displays a dominated splitting E ⊕ F. Moreover, both E and F are volume-hyperbolic. Finally, we prove the version of this result for divergence-free vector fields. As a consequence, in low dimensions, we obtain global hyperbolicity.     

The Maximum Lq-Likelihood Method: An Application to Extreme Quantile Estimation in Finance

Estimating financial risk is a critical issue for banks and insurance companies. Recently, quantile estimation based on extreme value theory (EVT) has found a successful domain of application in such a context, outperforming other methods. Given a parametric model provided by EVT, a natural approach is maximum likelihood estimation. Although the resulting estimator is asymptotically efficient, often the number of observations available to estimate the parameters of the EVT models is too small to make the large sample property trustworthy. In this paper, we study a new estimator of the parameters, the maximum Lq-likelihood estimator (MLqE), introduced by Ferrari and Yang (Estimation of tail probability via the maximum Lq-likelihood method, Technical Report 659, School of Statistics, University of Minnesota, 2007 ). We show that the MLqE outperforms the standard MLE, when estimating tail probabilities and quantiles of the generalized extreme value (GEV) and the generalized Pareto (GP) distributions. First, we assess the relative efficiency between the MLqE and the MLE for various sample sizes, using Monte Carlo simulations. Second, we analyze the performance of the MLqE for extreme quantile estimation using real-world financial data. The MLqE is characterized by a distortion parameter q and extends the traditional log-likelihood maximization procedure. When q→1, the new estimator approaches the traditional maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), recovering its desirable asymptotic properties; when q ≠ 1 and the sample size is moderate or small, the MLqE successfully trades bias for variance, resulting in an overall gain in terms of accuracy (mean squared error).      

A bound on the scrambling index of a primitive matrix using Boolean rank

The scrambling index of an n×n primitive matrix A is the smallest positive integer k such that A^k(A^t)^k=J, where A^t denotes the transpose of A and J denotes the n×n all ones matrix. For an m×n Boolean matrix M, its Boolean rank b(M) is the smallest positive integer b such that M=AB for some m×b Boolean matrix A and b×n Boolean matrix B. In this paper, we give an upper bound on the scrambling index of an n×n primitive matrix M in terms of its Boolean rank b(M). Furthermore we characterize all primitive matrices that achieve the upper bound.     

On a notion of partially conditionally identically distributed sequences

A notion of conditionally identically distributed (c.i.d.) sequences has been studied as a form of stochastic dependence weaker than exchangeability, but equivalent to it in the presence of stationarity. We extend such notion to families of sequences. Paralleling the extension from exchangeability to partial exchangeability in the sense of de Finetti, we propose a notion of partially c.i.d. dependence, which is shown to be equivalent to partial exchangeability for stationary processes. Partially c.i.d. families of sequences preserve attractive limit properties of partial exchangeability, and are asymptotically partially exchangeable. Moreover, we provide strong laws of large numbers and two central limit theorems. Our focus is on the asymptotic agreement of predictions and empirical means, which lies at the foundations of Bayesian statistics. Natural examples of partially c.i.d. constructions are interacting randomly reinforced processes satisfying certain conditions on the reinforcement.     

Extinction properties of multi-type continuous-state branching processes

Recently in Barczy et al. (2015), the notion of a multi-type continuous-state branching process (with immigration) having $d$-types was introduced as a solution to an $d$-dimensional vector-valued SDE. Preceding that, work on affine processes, originally motivated by mathematical finance, in Duffie et al. (2003) also showed the existence of such processes. See also more recent contributions in this direction due to Gabrielli and Teichmann (2014) and Caballero and Pérez Garmendia (2017). Older work on multi-type continuous-state branching processes is more sparse but includes Watanabe (1969) and Ma (2013), where only two types are considered. In this paper we take a completely different approach and consider multi-type continuous-state branching process, now allowing for up to a countable infinity of types, defined instead as a super Markov chain with both local and non-local branching mechanisms. In the spirit of Engländer and Kypriano (2004) we explore their extinction properties and pose a number of open problems.