Great advances have been made in recent years in the field of computational probability. In particular, the state of the art - as it relates to queuing systems, stochastic Petri-nets and systems dealing with reliability - has benefited significantly from these advances. The objective of this book is to make these topics accessible to researchers, graduate students, and practitioners. Great care was taken to make the exposition as clear as possible. Every line in the book has been evaluated, and changes have been made whenever it was felt that the initial exposition was not clear enough for the intended readership. The work of major research scholars in this field comprises the individual chapters of Computational Probability. The first chapter describes, in nonmathematical terms, the challenges in computational probability. Chapter 2 describes the methodologies available for obtaining the transition matrices for Markov chains, with particular emphasis on stochastic Petri-nets. Chapter 3 discusses how to find transient probabilities and transient rewards for these Markov chains. The next two chapters indicate how to find steady-state probabilities for Markov chains with a finite number of states. Both direct and iterative methods are described in Chapter 4. Details of these methods are given in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with infinite-state Markov chains, which occur frequently in queueing, because there are times one does not want to set a bound for all queues. Chapter 8 deals with transforms, in particular Laplace transforms. The work of Ward Whitt and his collaborators, who have recently developed a number of numerical methods for Laplace transform inversions, is emphasized in this chapter. Finally, if one wants to optimize a system, one way to do the optimization is through Markov decision making, described in Chapter 9. Markov modeling has found applications in many areas, three of which are described in detail: Chapter 10 analyzes discrete-time queues, Chapter 11 describes networks of queues, and Chapter 12 deals with reliability theory.

This title organizes computational probability methods into a systematic treatment. The book examines two categories of problems. "Algorithms for Continuous Random Variables" covers data structures and algorithms, transformations of random variables, and products of independent random variables. "Algorithms for Discrete Random Variables" discusses data structures and algorithms, sums of independent random variables, and order statistics.

A collection of twenty-one real-life probability puzzles and shows how to get numerical answers without having to solve complicated mathematical equations.

Computational Probability is a collection of papers presented at the Actuarial Research Conference on Computational Probability and related topics, held at Brown University on August 28-30, 1975. This 19-chapter book explores the development of computational techniques in probability and statistics and their application to problems in insurance. It covers six general topics, including computational probability, computational statistics, computational risk theory, analysis of algorithms, numerical methods, and notation and computation. Applications covered both life and nonlife insurance. This book will prove useful to applied mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists.

Great advances have been made in recent years in the field of computational probability. In particular, the state of the art - as it relates to queuing systems, stochastic Petri-nets and systems dealing with reliability - has benefited significantly from these advances. The objective of this book is to make these topics accessible to researchers, graduate students, and practitioners. Great care was taken to make the exposition as clear as possible. Every line in the book has been evaluated, and changes have been made whenever it was felt that the initial exposition was not clear enough for the intended readership. The work of major research scholars in this field comprises the individual chapters of Computational Probability. The first chapter describes, in nonmathematical terms, the challenges in computational probability. Chapter 2 describes the methodologies available for obtaining the transition matrices for Markov chains, with particular emphasis on stochastic Petri-nets. Chapter 3 discusses how to find transient probabilities and transient rewards for these Markov chains. The next two chapters indicate how to find steady-state probabilities for Markov chains with a finite number of states. Both direct and iterative methods are described in Chapter 4. Details of these methods are given in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with infinite-state Markov chains, which occur frequently in queueing, because there are times one does not want to set a bound for all queues. Chapter 8 deals with transforms, in particular Laplace transforms. The work of Ward Whitt and his collaborators, who have recently developed a number of numerical methods for Laplace transform inversions, is emphasized in this chapter. Finally, if one wants to optimize a system, one way to do the optimization is through Markov decision making, described in Chapter 9. Markov modeling has found applications in many areas, three of which are described in detail: Chapter 10 analyzes discrete-time queues, Chapter 11 describes networks of queues, and Chapter 12 deals with reliability theory.

In the present time, two of the most important approaches to tackle complex systems are probability and stochastic processes theory. Still from an analytic perspective, modeling and solving a problem using a stochastic approach is not a trivial issue, hence, a combination of the logic of probabilistic reasoning with computational science is needed to obtain qualitatively good solutions in a reasonable time. This eBook presents an interesting view of applications associated to fields of probability, statistics, and mathematic modeling, all of them supported by a computational context though the approach of stochasticity and simulation used in most of them. This collection contains three chapters, which bring applications in fields of biology, finance and physics, each chapter contains work(s) with specific applications. An editorial is also contained with a summarized version of each work, and each of them are widely explained in a specific section, which include a state of art to support the nature of the individual research, a methodology to solve the defined problem and the results and conclusions. We hope the present eBook can represent a potential source of knowledge for the academic community of implicated disciplines, and an inspirational starting point of starting for scientists in the amazing world of applied mathematics and the search to solve complex problems

This focuses on the developing field of building probability models with the power of symbolic algebra systems. The book combines the uses of symbolic algebra with probabilistic/stochastic application and highlights the applications in a variety of contexts. The research explored in each chapter is unified by the use of A Probability Programming Language (APPL) to achieve the modeling objectives. APPL, as a research tool, enables a probabilist or statistician the ability to explore new ideas, methods, and models. Furthermore, as an open-source language, it sets the foundation for future algorithms to augment the original code. Computational Probability Applications is comprised of fifteen chapters, each presenting a specific application of computational probability using the APPL modeling and computer language. The chapter topics include using inverse gamma as a survival distribution, linear approximations of probability density functions, and also moment-ratio diagrams for univariate distributions. These works highlight interesting examples, often done by undergraduate students and graduate students that can serve as templates for future work. In addition, this book should appeal to researchers and practitioners in a range of fields including probability, statistics, engineering, finance, neuroscience, and economics.

This book arose out of a number of different contexts, and numerous persons have contributed to its conception and development. It had its origin in a project initiated jointly with the IBM Cambridge Scien tific Center, particularly with Dr. Rhett Tsao, then of that Center. We are grateful to Mr. Norman Rasmussen, Manager of the IBM Scientific Center Complex, for his initial support. The work is being carried on at Brown University with generous support from the Office of Computing Activities of the National Science Foundation (grants GJ-174 and GJ-7l0); we are grateful to Dr. John Lehmann of this Office for his interest and encouragement. Professors Donald McClure and Richard Vitale of the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University contributed greatly to the project and taught courses in its spirit. We are indebted to them and to Dr. Tore Dalenius of the University of Stockholm for helpful criticisms of the manuscript. The final stimulus to the book's completion came from an invLtation to teach a course at the IBM European Systems Research Institute at Geneva. We are grateful to Dr. J.F. Blackburn, Director of the Institute, for his invitation, and to him and his wife Beverley for their hospitality. We are greatly indebted to Mrs. Katrina Avery for her splendid secretarial and editorial work on the manuscript.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Analytical and Computational Methods in Probability Theory and its Applications, ACMPT 2017, held in Moscow, Russia, in October 2017. The 42 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The conference program consisted of four main themes associated with significant contributions made by A.D.Soloviev. These are: Analytical methods in probability theory, Computational methods in probability theory, Asymptotical methods in probability theory, the history of mathematics.

Intermediate Probability is the natural extension of the author's Fundamental Probability. It details several highly important topics, from standard ones such as order statistics, multivariate normal, and convergence concepts, to more advanced ones which are usually not addressed at this mathematical level, or have never previously appeared in textbook form. The author adopts a computational approach throughout, allowing the reader to directly implement the methods, thus greatly enhancing the learning experience and clearly illustrating the applicability, strengths, and weaknesses of the theory. The book: Places great emphasis on the numeric computation of convolutions of random variables, via numeric integration, inversion theorems, fast Fourier transforms, saddlepoint approximations, and simulation. Provides introductory material to required mathematical topics such as complex numbers, Laplace and Fourier transforms, matrix algebra, confluent hypergeometric functions, digamma functions, and Bessel functions. Presents full derivation and numerous computational methods of the stable Paretian and the singly and doubly non-central distributions. A whole chapter is dedicated to mean-variance mixtures, NIG, GIG, generalized hyperbolic and numerous related distributions. A whole chapter is dedicated to nesting, generalizing, and asymmetric extensions of popular distributions, as have become popular in empirical finance and other applications. Provides all essential programming code in Matlab and R. The user-friendly style of writing and attention to detail means that self-study is easily possible, making the book ideal for senior undergraduate and graduate students of mathematics, statistics, econometrics, finance, insurance, and computer science, as well as researchers and professional statisticians working in these fields.