The large deviations analysis of solutions to stochastic differential equations and related processes is often based on approximation. The construction and justification of the approximations can be onerous, especially in the case where the process state is infinite dimensional. In this paper we show how such approximations can be avoided for a variety of infinite dimensional models driven by some form of Brownian noise. The approach is based on a variational representation for functionals of Brownian motion. Proofs of large deviations properties are reduced to demonstrating basic qualitative properties (existence, uniqueness and tightness) of certain perturbations of the original process.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOP362 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Stochastic partial differential equations driven by Poisson random measures (PRM) have been proposed as models for many different physical systems, where they are viewed as a refinement of a corresponding noiseless partial differential equation (PDE). A systematic framework for the study of probabilities of deviations of the stochastic PDE from the deterministic PDE is through the theory of large deviations. The goal of this work is to develop the large deviation theory for small Poisson noise perturbations of a general class of deterministic infinite dimensional models. Although the analogous questions for finite dimensional systems have been well studied, there are currently no general results in the infinite dimensional setting. This is in part due to the fact that in this setting solutions may have little spatial regularity, and thus classical approximation methods for large deviation analysis become intractable. The approach taken here, which is based on a variational representation for nonnegative functionals of general PRM, reduces the proof of the large deviation principle to establishing basic qualitative properties for controlled analogues of the underlying stochastic system. As an illustration of the general theory, we consider a particular system that models the spread of a pollutant in a waterway.

In a recent paper [5] it was shown that under suitable conditions stationary distributions of the (scaled) queue lengths process for a generalized Jackson network converge to the stationary distribution of the associated reflected Brownian motion in the heavy traffic limit. The proof relied on certain exponential integrability assumptions on the primitives of the network. In this note we show that the above result holds under much weaker integrability conditions. We provide an alternative proof of this result making (in addition to natural heavy traffic and stability assumptions) only standard independence and square integrability assumptions on the network primitives that are commonly used in heavy traffic analysis. Furthermore, under additional integrability conditions we establish convergence of moments of stationary distributions.

We study large deviation properties of systems of weakly interacting particles modeled by Itô stochastic differential equations (SDEs). It is known under certain conditions that the corresponding sequence of empirical measures converges, as the number of particles tends to infinity, to the weak solution of an associated McKean–Vlasov equation. We derive a large deviation principle via the weak convergence approach. The proof, which avoids discretization arguments, is based on a representation theorem, weak convergence and ideas from stochastic optimal control. The method works under rather mild assumptions and also for models described by SDEs not of diffusion type. To illustrate this, we treat the case of SDEs with delay

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Random graph models with limited choice have been studied extensively with the goal of understanding the mechanism of the emergence of the giant component. One of the standard models are the Achlioptas random graph processes on a fixed set of n vertices. Here at each step, one chooses two edges uniformly at random and then decides which one to add to the existing configuration according to some criterion. An important class of such rules are the bounded-size rules where for a fixed K ≥ 1, all components of size greater than K are treated equally. While a great deal of work has gone into analyzing the subcritical and supercritical regimes, the nature of the critical scaling window, the size and complexity (deviation from trees) of the components in the critical regime and nature of the merging dynamics has not been well understood. In this work we study such questions for general bounded-size rules. Our first main contribution is the construction of an extension of Aldous's standard multiplicative coalescent process which describes the asymptotic evolution of the vector of sizes and surplus of all components. We show that this process, referred to as the standard augmented multiplicative coalescent (AMC) is 'nearly' Feller with a suitable topology on the state space. Our second main result proves the convergence of suitably scaled component size and surplus vector, for any bounded-size rule, to the standard AMC. This result is new even for the classical Erdős-Rényi setting. The key ingredients here are a precise analysis of the asymptotic behavior of various susceptibility functions near criticality and certain bounds from [8], on the size of the largest component in the barely subcritical regime.

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We consider the scheduling control problem for a family of unitary networks under heavy traffic, with general interarrival and service times, probabilistic routing and infinite horizon discounted linear holding cost. A natural nonanticipativity condition for admissibility of control policies is introduced. The condition is seen to hold for a broad class of problems. Using this formulation of admissible controls and a time-transformation technique, we establish that the infimum of the cost for the network control problem over all admissible sequencing control policies is asymptotically bounded below by the value function of an associated diffusion control problem (the Brownian control problem). This result provides a useful bound on the best achievable performance for any admissible control policy for a wide class of networks.