On the origin of bursts and heavy tails in animal dynamics

Over recent years there has been an accumulation of evidence that many animal behaviours are characterised by common scale-invariant patterns of switching between two contrasting activities over a period of time. This is evidenced in mammalian wake-sleep patterns, in the intermittent stop-start locomotion of Drosophila fruit flies, and in the Lévy walk movement patterns of a diverse range of animals in which straight-line movements are punctuated by occasional turns. Here it is shown that these dynamics can be modelled by a stochastic variant of Barabási’s model [A.-L. Barabási, The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics, Nature 435 (2005) 207-211] for bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. The new model captures a tension between two competing and conflicting activities. The durations of one type of activity are distributed according to an inverse-square power-law, mirroring the ubiquity of inverse-square power-law scaling seen in empirical data. The durations of the second type of activity follow exponential distributions with characteristic timescales that depend on species and metabolic rates. This again is a common feature of animal behaviour. Bursty human dynamics, on the other hand, are characterised by power-law distributions with scaling exponents close to −1 and −3/2.     

Adaptive nonparametric estimation for Lévy processes observed at low frequency

This article deals with adaptive nonparametric estimation for Lévy processes observed at low frequency. For general linear functionals of the Lévy measure, we construct kernel estimators, provide upper risk bounds and derive rates of convergence under regularity assumptions.     

Random Flights in Higher Spaces

We consider in this paper random flights in ℝ ^d performed by a particle changing direction of motion at Poisson times. Directions are uniformly distributed on hyperspheres S ₁ ^d . We obtain the conditional characteristic function of the position of the particle after n changes of direction. From this characteristic function we extract the conditional distributions in terms of (n+1)−fold integrals of products of Bessel functions. These integrals can be worked out in simple terms for spaces of dimension d=2 and d=4. In these two cases also the unconditional distribution is determined in explicit form. Some distributions connected with random flights in ℝ³ are discussed and in some special cases are analyzed in full detail. We point out that a strict connection between these types of motions with infinite directions and the equation of damped waves holds only for d=2. Related motions with random velocity in spaces of lower dimension are analyzed and their distributions derived.     

A Functional LIL for <Emphasis Type="Italic">d</Emphasis>-Dimensional Stable Processes; Invariance for Lévy- and Other Weakly Convergent Processes

We establish a functional LIL for the maximal process M(t) :=sup _0≤s≤t ‖X(s)‖ of an ℝ ^d -valued α-stable Lévy process X, provided X(1) has density bounded away from zero over some neighborhood of the origin. We also provide a broad invariance result governing a class independent-increment processes related to the domain of attraction of X(1). This breadth is particularly notable for two types of processes captured: First, it not only describes any partial sum process built from iid summands in the domain of normal attraction of X(1), but also addresses those with arbitrary iid summands in the full domain of attraction (here we give a technical condition necessary and sufficient for the partial sum process to share the exact LIL we prove for X). Second, it reveals that any Lévy process L such that L(1) satisfies the technical condition just mentioned will also share the LIL of X. Supported in part by NSF Grant DMS 02-05034.     

Another view on martingale central limit theorems

Based on the martingale version of the Skorokhod embedding Heyde and Brown (1970) established a bound on the rate of convergence in the central limit theorem (CLT) for discrete time martingales having finite moments of order 2+2δ with 0<δ1. An extension for all δ>0 was proved in Haeusler (1988). This paper presents a rather quick access based solely on truncation, optional stopping, and prolongation techniques for martingale difference arrays to obtain other upper bounds for sup

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(φbeing the standard normal d.f.) yielding weak sufficient conditions for the asymptotic normality of . It is shown that our approach also yields two types of martingale central limit theorems with random norming.     

A spectroscopic investigation of turbulence in magnetized plasmas

We present a spectroscopic investigation of turbulence in the Tore-Supra edge plasma, where deuterium spectral lines are found to exhibit a power-law behavior in their wings. Such a feature is not predicted by the equilibrium line broadening theory in the conditions of the edge plasma, where the thermal Stark effect is negligible. Therefore, the possible role of turbulence is investigated along two separate paths. Indeed, both the Stark and the Doppler profiles may differ significantly from the equilibrium profiles.     

Energy and number of collision fluctuations in inelastic gases

The two-dimensional Inelastic Maxwell Model (IMM) is studied by numerical simulations. It is shown how the inelasticity of collisions together with the fluctuations of the number of collisions undergone by a particle lead to energy fluctuations. These fluctuations are associated to a shrinking of the available phase space. We find the asymptotic scaling of these energy fluctuations and show how they affect the tail of the velocity distribution during long time intervals. We stress that these fluctuations relax like power laws on much slower time scales than the usual exponential relaxations taking place in kinetic theory.     

The first,the biggest,and other such considerations

We investigate the relation between the underlying dynamics of randomly evolv ing systems and the extrema statistics for such systems. Independent processes, Fokker-Planck processes and Lévy processes are considered.