We consider multi-stage stochastic fluid models (SFMs), driven by applications in telecommunications and manufacturing in which control of the behavior of the system during congestion may be required. In a two-stage SFM, the process starts from Stage 1 in level 0, and moves to Stage 2 when...

This paper presents a scenario-based approach to strategic environmental assessment (SEA) for wetland trend analysis and land use and land cover (LUC) modeling in an urban environment. The application is focused on the Saskatoon urban environment, a rapidly growing urban municipality in...

Accurate cash flow forecasting is essential for successful management of firms and it becomes especially critical during uncertain market and credit conditions. Without accurate cash flow forecasting, a firm may fail to meet its short-term obligations and risk bankruptcy. Accurate cash flow...

In this paper, we propose a likelihood ratio and Markov chain based method to evaluate density forecasting. This method can jointly evaluate the unconditional forecasted distribution and dependence of the outcomes. This method is an extension of the widely applied evaluation method for interval...

A number of high profile policy documents have emphasised the need to increase food production under projected land scarcity. Sustainable intensification is a proposed solution to this challenge, which is a technology-led pathway for development. Definitions of sustainable intensification have...

Annual population growth rate in Turkey is as high as 1.1 per cent, while many EU countries have shrinking, and hence ageing, populations. In this paper we consider an age-structured population that consists of female natives and Turkish immigrants into the EU. Immigrants’ fertility and...

In a bonus-malus system in car insurance, the bonus class of a customer is updated from one year to the next as a function of the current class and the number of claims in the year (assumed Poisson). Thus the sequence of classes of a customer in consecutive years forms a Markov chain, and most...

Gibbs samplers derived under different parametrizations of the target density can have radically different rates of convergence. In this article, we specify conditions under which reparametrization leaves the convergence rate of a Gibbs chain unchanged. An example illustrates how these results...

We consider a stochastic image restoration model proposed by A. Gibbs (2004), and give an upper bound on the time it takes for a Markov chain defined by this model to be ϵ-close in total variation to equilibrium. We use Gibbs’ result for convergence in the Wasserstein metric to arrive at our...

In this work we consider a power series of the form X=∑j=0∞δjZj where 0δ1 and {Zj}j≥0 is an i.i.d. sequence of random variables. We show that X is well-defined iff E[(log|Z0|)+]∞ and establish a number of properties of the distribution of X, such as continuity and closure under...