Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

Distance covariance is a quantity to measure the dependence of two random vectors. We show that the original concept introduced and developed by Székely, Rizzo and Bakirov can be embedded into a more general framework based on symmetric Lévy measures and the corresponding real-valued continuous negative definite functions. The Lévy measures replace the weight functions used in the original definition of distance covariance. All essential properties of distance covariance are preserved in this new framework.

The effect that weighted summands have on each other in approximations of $S={w_{1}}{S_{1}}+{w_{2}}{S_{2}}+\cdots +{w_{N}}{S_{N}}$ is investigated. Here, ${S_{i}}$’s are sums of integer-valued random variables, and ${w_{i}}$ denote weights, $i=1,\dots ,N$. Two cases are considered: the general case of independent random variables when their closeness is ensured by the matching of factorial moments and the case when the ${S_{i}}$ has the Markov Binomial distribution. The Kolmogorov metric is used to estimate the accuracy of approximation.

In this paper we define the fractional Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process as $X_{t}:={Y_{t}^{2}}\mathbf{1}_{\{t<\inf \{s>0:Y_{s}=0\}\}}$, where the process $Y=\{Y_{t},t\ge 0\}$ satisfies the SDE of the form $dY_{t}=\frac{1}{2}(\frac{k}{Y_{t}}-aY_{t})dt+\frac{\sigma }{2}d{B_{t}^{H}}$, $\{{B_{t}^{H}},t\ge 0\}$ is a fractional Brownian motion with an arbitrary Hurst parameter $H\in (0,1)$. We prove that $X_{t}$ satisfies the stochastic differential equation of the form $dX_{t}=(k-aX_{t})dt+\sigma \sqrt{X_{t}}\circ d{B_{t}^{H}}$, where the integral with respect to fractional Brownian motion is considered as the pathwise Stratonovich integral. We also show that for $k>0$, $H>1/2$ the process is strictly positive and never hits zero, so that actually $X_{t}={Y_{t}^{2}}$. Finally, we prove that in the case of $H<1/2$ the probability of not hitting zero on any fixed finite interval by the fractional Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process tends to 1 as $k\to \infty $.