Markov processes is the class of stochastic processes whose past and future are conditionally independent, given their present state. They constitute important models in many applied fields.

After an introduction to the Monte Carlo method, this book describes discrete time Markov chains, the Poisson process and continuous time Markov chains. It also presents numerous applications including Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Simulated Annealing, Hidden Markov Models, Annotation and Alignment of Genomic sequences, Control and Filtering, Phylogenetic tree reconstruction and Queuing networks. The last chapter is an introduction to stochastic calculus and mathematical finance.

Features include:

Focussing on stochastic models for the spread of infectious diseases in a human population, this book is the outcome of a two-week ICPAM/CIMPA school on "Stochastic models of epidemics" which took place in Ziguinchor, Senegal, December 5–16, 2015. The text is divided into four parts, each based on one of the courses given at the school: homogeneous models (Tom Britton and Etienne Pardoux), two-level mixing models (David Sirl and Frank Ball), epidemics on graphs (Viet Chi Tran), and statistics for epidemic models (Catherine Larédo).

The CIMPA school was aimed at PhD students and Post Docs in the mathematical sciences. Parts (or all) of this book can be used as the basis for traditional or individual reading courses on the topic. For this reason, examples and exercises (some with solutions) are provided throughout.

This book gives a concise introduction to the classical theory of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). It begins by describing the classes of equations which are studied later in the book, together with a list of motivating examples of SPDEs which are used in physics, population dynamics, neurophysiology, finance and signal processing. The central part of the book studies SPDEs as infinite-dimensional SDEs, based on the variational approach to PDEs. This extends both the classical Itô formulation and the martingale problem approach due to Stroock and Varadhan. The final chapter considers the solution of a space-time white noise-driven SPDE as a real-valued function of time and (one-dimensional) space. The results of J. Walsh''s St Flour notes on the existence, uniqueness and Hölder regularity of the solution are presented. In addition, conditions are given under which the solution remains nonnegative, and the Malliavin calculus is applied. Lastly, reflected SPDEs and their connection with super Brownian motion are considered.

At a time when new sophisticated branches of the subject are being developed, this book will be a welcome reference on classical SPDEs for newcomers to the theory.

This research monograph presents results to researchers in stochastic calculus, forward and backward stochastic differential equations, connections between diffusion processes and second order partial differential equations (PDEs), and financial mathematics. It pays special attention to the relations between SDEs/BSDEs and second order PDEs under minimal regularity assumptions, and also extends those results to equations with multivalued coefficients. The authors present in particular the theory of reflected SDEs in the above mentioned framework and include exercises at the end of each chapter.

Stochastic calculus and stochastic differential equations (SDEs) were first introduced by K. Itô in the 1940s, in order to construct the path of diffusion processes (which are continuous time Markov processes with continuous trajectories taking their values in a finite dimensional vector space or manifold), which had been studied from a more analytic point of view by Kolmogorov in the 1930s. Since then, this topic has become an important subject of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, because of its mathematical richness and its importance for applications in many areas of Physics, Biology, Economics and Finance, where random processes play an increasingly important role. One important aspect is the connection between diffusion processes and linear partial differential equations of second order, which is in particular the basis for Monte Carlo numerical methods for linear PDEs. Since the pioneering work of Peng and Pardoux in the early 1990s, a new type of SDEs called backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) has emerged. The two main reasons why this new class of equations is important are the connection between BSDEs and semilinear PDEs, and the fact that BSDEs constitute a natural generalization of the famous Black and Scholes model from Mathematical Finance, and thus offer a natural mathematical framework for the formulation of many new models in Finance.

Markov processes is the class of stochastic processes whose past and future are conditionally independent, given their present state. They constitute important models in many applied fields.

After an introduction to the Monte Carlo method, this book describes discrete time Markov chains, the Poisson process and continuous time Markov chains. It also presents numerous applications including Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Simulated Annealing, Hidden Markov Models, Annotation and Alignment of Genomic sequences, Control and Filtering, Phylogenetic tree reconstruction and Queuing networks. The last chapter is an introduction to stochastic calculus and mathematical finance.

Features include:

Focussing on stochastic models for the spread of infectious diseases in a human population, this book is the outcome of a two-week ICPAM/CIMPA school on "Stochastic models of epidemics" which took place in Ziguinchor, Senegal, December 5–16, 2015. The text is divided into four parts, each based on one of the courses given at the school: homogeneous models (Tom Britton and Etienne Pardoux), two-level mixing models (David Sirl and Frank Ball), epidemics on graphs (Viet Chi Tran), and statistics for epidemic models (Catherine Larédo).

The CIMPA school was aimed at PhD students and Post Docs in the mathematical sciences. Parts (or all) of this book can be used as the basis for traditional or individual reading courses on the topic. For this reason, examples and exercises (some with solutions) are provided throughout.

This book gives a concise introduction to the classical theory of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). It begins by describing the classes of equations which are studied later in the book, together with a list of motivating examples of SPDEs which are used in physics, population dynamics, neurophysiology, finance and signal processing. The central part of the book studies SPDEs as infinite-dimensional SDEs, based on the variational approach to PDEs. This extends both the classical Itô formulation and the martingale problem approach due to Stroock and Varadhan. The final chapter considers the solution of a space-time white noise-driven SPDE as a real-valued function of time and (one-dimensional) space. The results of J. Walsh''s St Flour notes on the existence, uniqueness and Hölder regularity of the solution are presented. In addition, conditions are given under which the solution remains nonnegative, and the Malliavin calculus is applied. Lastly, reflected SPDEs and their connection with super Brownian motion are considered.

At a time when new sophisticated branches of the subject are being developed, this book will be a welcome reference on classical SPDEs for newcomers to the theory.

This research monograph presents results to researchers in stochastic calculus, forward and backward stochastic differential equations, connections between diffusion processes and second order partial differential equations (PDEs), and financial mathematics. It pays special attention to the relations between SDEs/BSDEs and second order PDEs under minimal regularity assumptions, and also extends those results to equations with multivalued coefficients. The authors present in particular the theory of reflected SDEs in the above mentioned framework and include exercises at the end of each chapter.

Stochastic calculus and stochastic differential equations (SDEs) were first introduced by K. Itô in the 1940s, in order to construct the path of diffusion processes (which are continuous time Markov processes with continuous trajectories taking their values in a finite dimensional vector space or manifold), which had been studied from a more analytic point of view by Kolmogorov in the 1930s. Since then, this topic has become an important subject of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, because of its mathematical richness and its importance for applications in many areas of Physics, Biology, Economics and Finance, where random processes play an increasingly important role. One important aspect is the connection between diffusion processes and linear partial differential equations of second order, which is in particular the basis for Monte Carlo numerical methods for linear PDEs. Since the pioneering work of Peng and Pardoux in the early 1990s, a new type of SDEs called backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) has emerged. The two main reasons why this new class of equations is important are the connection between BSDEs and semilinear PDEs, and the fact that BSDEs constitute a natural generalization of the famous Black and Scholes model from Mathematical Finance, and thus offer a natural mathematical framework for the formulation of many new models in Finance.