Sreela Gangopadhyay

Asymptotic properties of sums of upper records

Arnold and Villaseñor (1999) raised several questions for upper records, including characterizing all limit distributions of normalized partial sums of upper records. We provide some answers in the case when the distribution from which the samples are drawn is bounded above. When the distribution is not bounded above, we give sufficient conditions on the distribution for the properly normalized partial sums to converge to a standard normal distribution. We show that our conditions are general enough so that the examples provided by Arnold and Villaseñor (1999) are covered by our results.

A note on random coin tossing

Harris and Keane [Probab. Theory Related Fields 109 (1997) 27-37] studied absolute continuity/singularity of two probabilities on the coin-tossing space, one representing independent tosses of a fair coin, while in the other a biased coin is tossed at renewal times of an independent renewal process and a fair coin is tossed at all other times. We extend their results by allowing possibly different biases at the different renewal times. We also investigate the contiguity and asymptotic separation properties in this kind of set-up and obtain some sufficient conditions.

Pfeifer records process

In this article, we study the limit distribution of sums of Pfeifer records. Motivated by the results obtained by Arnold and Villaseñor [Generalized order statistics process and Pfeifer records, Statistics 46(3) (2012), pp. 373–385], we show that the partial sum process of Pfeifer records converge to a function of the Brownian motion. The normalization is either a sequence of appropriate constants or a sequence of functions, depending on the tail behaviour of the underlying variables. These results, in particular, prove stronger version of results obtained in Villaseñor and Arnold [On limit laws for sums of Pfeifer records, Extremes 10 (2007), pp. 235–248] and Bose and Gangopadhyay [Convergence of linear functions of Pfeifer records, Extremes 13 (2010), pp. 89–106] and extends results of Bose et al. [Partial sum process for records, Extremes 8 (2005), pp. 43–56] from classical records to Pfeifer records.

Convergence of a class of Toeplitz type matrices

We use the method of moments to study the spectral properties in the bulk for finite diagonal large dimensional random and non-random Toeplitz type matrices via the joint convergence of matrices in an appropriate sense. As a consequence we revisit the famous limit theorem of Szego for non-random symmetric Toeplitz matrices.