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Amarjit Budhiraja

Publications and source records attributed to Amarjit Budhiraja.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Large deviation principles for stochastic dynamical systems with a fractional Brownian noise

We study small noise large deviation asymptotics for stochastic differential equations with a multiplicative noise given as a fractional Brownian motion $B^H$ with Hurst parameter $H>\frac12$. The solutions of the stochastic differential equations are defined pathwise under appropriate conditions on the coefficients. The ingredients in the proof of the large deviation principle, which include a variational representation for nonnegative functionals of fractional Brownian motions and a general sufficient condition for a LDP for a collection of functionals of a fractional Brownian motions, have a broader applicability than the model considered here.

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Near Equilibrium Fluctuations for Supermarket Models with Growing Choices

We consider the supermarket model in the usual Markovian setting where jobs arrive at rate $n λ_n$ for some $λ_n > 0$, with $n$ parallel servers each processing jobs in its queue at rate 1. An arriving job joins the shortest among $d_n \le n$ randomly selected service queues. We show that when $d_n \to \infty$ and $λ_n \to λ\in (0, \infty)$, under natural conditions on the initial queues, the state occupancy process converges in probability, in a suitable path space, to the unique solution of an infinite system of constrained ordinary differential equations parametrized by $λ$. Our main interest is in the study of fluctuations of the state process about its near equilibrium state in the critical regime, namely when $λ_n \to 1$. Previous papers have considered the regime $\frac{d_n}{\sqrt{n}\log n} \to \infty$ while the objective of the current work is to develop diffusion approximations for the state occupancy process that allow for all possible rates of growth of $d_n$. In particular we consider the three canonical regimes (a) ${d_n}/{\sqrt{n}} \to 0$; (b) ${d_n}/{\sqrt{n}} \to c\in (0,\infty)$ and, (c) ${d_n}/{\sqrt{n}} \to \infty$. In all three regimes we show, by establishing suitable functional limit theorems, that (under conditions on $λ_n$) fluctuations of the state process about its near equilibrium are of order $n^{-1/2}$ and are governed asymptotically by a one dimensional Brownian motion. The forms of the limit processes in the three regimes are quite different; in the first case we get a linear diffusion; in the second case we get a diffusion with an exponential drift; and in the third case we obtain a reflected diffusion in a half space. In the special case ${d_n}/({\sqrt{n}\log n}) \to \infty$ our work gives alternative proofs for the universality results established by Mukherjee et al in 2018.

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Large Deviations of the Entropy Production Rate for a Class of Gaussian Processes

We prove a large deviation principle (LDP) and a fluctuation theorem (FT) for the entropy production rate (EPR) of the following $d$ dimensional stochastic differential equation \begin{equation*} d X_{t}=AX_{t} d t+\sqrt{Q} d B_{t} \end{equation*} where $A$ is a real normal stable matrix, $Q$ is positive definite, and the matrices $A$ and $Q$ commute. The rate function for the EPR takes the following explicit form: \begin{equation*} I(x)=\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} x\frac{\sqrt{1+\ell_0(x)}-1}{2}+\frac 12\sum\limits_{k=1}^{d} \left(\sqrt{α_k^2- β_k^2\ell_0(x)}+α_k\right) , & x\ge 0 , \\ -x\frac{\sqrt{1+\ell_0(x)}+1}{2} +\frac 12\sum\limits_{k=1}^{d} \left(\sqrt{α_k^2- β_k^2\ell_0(x)}+α_k\right) , &x<0, \end{array} \right. \end{equation*} where $α_{k}\pm {\rm i} β_{k}$ are the eigenvalues of $A$, and $\ell_0(x)$ is the unique solution of the equation: \begin{align*} |x|={\sqrt{1+\ell}} \times \sum_{k=1}^{d} \frac{β_k^2}{\sqrt{α_k^2 -\ellβ_k^2} },\qquad -1 \le \ell< \min_{k=1,...,d}\{\frac{α_k^2}{β_k^2}\}. \end{align*} Simple closed form formulas for rate functions are rare and our work identifies an important class of large deviation problems where such formulas are available. The logarithmic moment generating function (the fluctuation function) $Λ$ associated with the LDP has a closed form (see it in the paper). The functions $Λ(λ)$ and $ I(x)$ satisfy the Cohen-Gallavotti symmetry properties. In particular, the functions $I$ and $Λ$ do not depend on the diffusion matrix $Q$, and are determined completely by the real and imaginary parts of the eigenvalues of $A$. Formally, the deterministic system with $Q=0$ has zero EPR and thus the model exhibits a phase transition in that the EPR changes discontinuously at $Q = 0$.

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Large Deviations for the Single Server Queue and the Reneging Paradox

For the M/M/1+M model at the law-of-large-numbers scale, the long run reneging count per unit time does not depend on the individual (i.e., per customer) reneging rate. This paradoxical statement has a simple proof. Less obvious is a large deviations analogue of this fact, stated as follows: The decay rate of the probability that the long run reneging count per unit time is atypically large or atypically small does not depend on the individual reneging rate. In this paper, the sample path large deviations principle for the model is proved and the rate function is computed. Next, large time asymptotics for the reneging rate are studied for the case when the arrival rate exceeds the service rate. The key ingredient is a calculus of variations analysis of the variational problem associated with atypical reneging. A characterization of the aforementioned decay rate, given explicitly in terms of the arrival and service rate parameters of the model, is provided yielding a precise mathematical description of this paradoxical behavior.

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Large Deviation Principle for the Exploration Process of the Configuration Model

The configuration model is a sequence of random graphs constructed such that in the large network limit the degree distribution converges to a pre-specified probability distribution. The component structure of such random graphs can be obtained from an infinite dimensional Markov chain referred to as the exploration process. We establish a large deviation principle for the exploration process associated with the configuration model. Proofs rely on a representation of the exploration process as a system of stochastic differential equations driven by Poisson random measures and variational formulas for moments of nonnegative functionals of Poisson random measures. Uniqueness results for certain controlled systems of deterministic equations play a key role in the analysis. Applications of the large deviation results, for studying asymptotic behavior of the degree sequence in large components of the random graphs, are discussed.

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Parameter and dimension dependence of convergence rates to stationarity for Reflecting Brownian Motions

We obtain rates of convergence to stationarity in L^1-Wasserstein distance for a d-dimensional reflected Brownian motion (RBM) in the nonnegative orthant that are explicit in the dimension and the system parameters. The results are then applied to a class of RBMs considered in Blanchet-Chen (2016) and to rank-based diffusions including the Atlas model. In both cases, we obtain explicit rates and bounds on relaxation times. In the first case we improve the relaxation time estimates of O(d^4(log d)^2) obtained in Blanchet-Chen (2016) to O((log d)^2). In the latter case, we give the first results on explicit parameter and dimension dependent rates under the Wasserstein distance. The proofs do not require an explicit form for the stationary measure or reversibility of the process with respect to this measure, and cover settings where these properties are not available. In the special case of the standard Atlas model, we obtain a bound on the relaxation time of O(d^6(log d)^2).

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Asymptotics of Quasi-Stationary Distributions of Small Noise Stochastic Dynamical Systems in Unbounded Domains

We consider a collection of Markov chains that model the evolution of multitype biological populations. The state space of the chains is the positive orthant, and the boundary of the orthant is absorbing representing the extinction states of different population types. We are interested in the long-term behavior of the Markov chain away from extinction, under a small noise scaling. Under this scaling, the trajectory of the Markov process over any compact interval converges in distribution to the solution of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) evolving in the positive orthant. We study the asymptotic behavior of the quasi-stationary distributions (QSD) in this scaling regime. Our main result shows that the limit points of the QSD are supported on the union of interior attractors of the flow determined by the ODE. We also give lower bounds on expected extinction times which scale exponentially with the system size. Results of this type when the deterministic dynamical system obtained under the scaling limit is given by a discrete time evolution equation and the dynamics are essentially in a compact space (namely, the one step map is a bounded function) have been studied by Faure and Schreiber (2014). Our results extend these to a setting of an unbounded state space and continuous time dynamics. The proofs rely on uniform large deviation results for small noise stochastic dynamical systems and methods from the theory of dynamical systems. In general QSD for Markov chains with absorbing states and unbounded state spaces may not exist. We study one basic family of Binomial-Poisson models in the positive orthant where one can use Lyapunov function methods to establish existence of QSD and also to argue the tightness of the QSD of the scaled sequence of Markov chains. The results from the first part are then used to characterize the support of limit points of this sequence of QSD.

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Minimization of a Class of Rare Event Probabilities and Buffer Probabilities of Exceedance

We consider the problem of choosing design parameters to minimize the probability of an undesired rare event that is described through the average of $n$ iid random variables. Since the probability of interest for near optimal design parameters is very small, one needs to develop suitable accelerated Monte-Carlo methods for estimating the objective function of interest. One of the challenges in the study is that simulating from exponential twists of the laws of the summands may be computationally demanding since these transformed laws may be non-standard and intractable. We consider a setting where the summands are given as a nonlinear functional of random variables that are more tractable for importance sampling in that the exponential twists of their distributions take a simpler form (than that for the original summands). We also study the closely related problem of estimating buffered probability of exceedance and provide the first rigorous results that relate the asymptotics of buffered probability and that of the ordinary probability under a large deviation scaling. The analogous minimization problem for buffered probability, under conditions, can be formulated as a convex optimization problem which makes it more tractable than the original optimization problem. We show that, under conditions, changes of measures that are asymptotically efficient (under the large deviation scaling) for estimating ordinary probability are also asymptotically efficient for estimating the buffered probability of exceedance. We embed the constructed importance sampling scheme in suitable gradient descent/ascent algorithms for solving the optimization problems of interest. Implementation of schemes for some examples is illustrated through computational experiments.

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Supermarket Model on Graphs

We consider a variation of the supermarket model in which the servers can communicate with their neighbors and where the neighborhood relationships are described in terms of a suitable graph. Tasks with unit-exponential service time distributions arrive at each vertex as independent Poisson processes with rate $λ$, and each task is irrevocably assigned to the shortest queue among the one it first appears and its $d-1$ randomly selected neighbors. This model has been extensively studied when the underlying graph is a clique in which case it reduces to the well known power-of-$d$ scheme. In particular, results of Mitzenmacher (1996) and Vvedenskaya et al. (1996) show that as the size of the clique gets large, the occupancy process associated with the queue-lengths at the various servers converges to a deterministic limit described by an infinite system of ordinary differential equations (ODE). In this work, we consider settings where the underlying graph need not be a clique and is allowed to be suitably sparse. We show that if the minimum degree approaches infinity (however slowly) as the number of servers $N$ approaches infinity, and the ratio between the maximum degree and the minimum degree in each connected component approaches 1 uniformly, the occupancy process converges to the same system of ODE as the classical supermarket model. In particular, the asymptotic behavior of the occupancy process is insensitive to the precise network topology. We also study the case where the graph sequence is random, with the $N$-th graph given as an Erdős-Rényi random graph on $N$ vertices with average degree $c(N)$. Annealed convergence of the occupancy process to the same deterministic limit is established under the condition $c(N)\to\infty$, and under a stronger condition $c(N)/\ln N\to\infty$, convergence (in probability) is shown for almost every realization of the random graph.

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A numerical scheme for a mean field game in some queueing systems based on Markov chain approximation method

We use the Markov chain approximation method to construct approximations for the solution of the mean field game (MFG) with reflecting barriers studied in Bayraktar, Budhiraja, and Cohen (2017). The MFG is formulated in terms of a controlled reflected diffusion with a cost function that depends on the reflection terms in addition to the standard variables: state, control, and the mean field term. This MFG arises from the asymptotic analysis of an $N$-player game for single server queues with strategic servers. By showing that our scheme is an almost contraction, we establish the convergence of this numerical scheme over a small time interval.

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Large Deviations from the Hydrodynamic Limit for a System with Nearest Neighbor Interactions

We give a new proof of the large deviation principle from the hydrodynamic limit for the Ginzberg-Landau model studied in Donsker and Varadhan (1989) using techniques from the theory of stochastic control and weak convergence methods. The proof is based on characterizing subsequential hydrodynamic limits of controlled diffusions with nearest neighbor interaction that arise from a variational representation of certain Laplace functionals. The approach taken here does not require superexponential probability estimates, estimation of exponential moments, or an analysis of eigenvalue problems, that are central ingredients in previous proofs. Instead, proof techniques are very similar to those used for the law of large number analysis, namely in the proof of convergence to the hydrodynamic limit (cf. Guo, Papanicolaou and Varadhan (1988)). Specifically, the key step in the proof is establishing suitable bounds on relative entropies and Dirichlet forms associated with certain controlled laws. This general approach has the promise to be applicable to other interacting particle systems as well and to the case of non-equilibrium starting configurations, and to infinite volume systems.

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Uniform large deviation principles for Banach space valued stochastic differential equations

We prove a large deviation principle (LDP) for a general class of Banach space valued stochastic differential equations (SDE) that is uniform with respect to initial conditions in bounded subsets of the Banach space. A key step in the proof is showing that a uniform large deviation principle over compact sets is implied by a uniform over compact sets Laplace principle. Because bounded subsets of infinite dimensional Banach spaces are in general not relatively compact in the norm topology, we embed the Banach space into its double dual and utilize the weak-$\star $ compactness of closed bounded sets in the double dual space. We prove that a modified version of our stochastic differential equation satisfies a uniform Laplace principle over weak-$\star $ compact sets and consequently a uniform over bounded sets large deviation principle. We then transfer this result back to the original equation using a contraction principle. The main motivation for this uniform LDP is to generalize results of Freidlin and Wentzell concerning the behavior of finite dimensional SDEs. Here we apply the uniform LDP to study the asymptotics of exit times from bounded sets of Banach space valued small noise SDE, including reaction diffusion equations with multiplicative noise and $2$-dimensional stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with multiplicative noise.

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Control Policies Approaching HGI Performance in Heavy Traffic for Resource Sharing Networks

We consider resource sharing networks of the form introduced in the work of Massoulié and Roberts(2000) as models for Internet flows. The goal is to study the open problem, formulated in Harrison et al. (2014), of constructing simple form rate allocation policies for broad families of resource sharing networks with associated costs converging to the Hierarchical Greedy Ideal performance in the heavy traffic limit. We consider two types of cost criteria, an infinite horizon discounted cost, and a long time average cost per unit time. We introduce a sequence of rate allocation control policies that are determined in terms of certain thresholds for the scaled queue length processes and prove that, under conditions, both type of costs associated with these policies converge in the heavy traffic limit to the corresponding HGI performance. The conditions needed for these results are satisfied by all the examples considered in Harrison et al. (2014).

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Rate Control under Heavy Traffic with Strategic Servers

We consider a large queueing system that consists of many strategic servers that are weakly interacting. Each server processes jobs from its unique critically loaded buffer and controls the rate of arrivals and departures associated with its queue to minimize its expected cost. The rates and the cost functions in addition to depending on the control action, can depend, in a symmetric fashion, on the size of the individual queue and the empirical measure of the states of all queues in the system. In order to determine an approximate Nash equilibrium for this finite player game we construct a Lasry-Lions type mean-field game (MFG) for certain reflected diffusions that governs the limiting behavior. Under conditions, we establish the convergence of the Nash-equilibrium value for the finite size queuing system to the value of the MFG.

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Diffusion Approximations for Load Balancing Mechanisms in Cloud Storage Systems

In large storage systems, files are often coded across several servers to improve reliability and retrieval speed. We study load balancing under the Batch Sampling routing scheme for a network of $n$ servers storing a set of files using the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) code (cf. Li, Ramamoorthy, and Srikant (2016)). Specifically, each file is stored in equally sized pieces across $L$ servers such that any $k$ pieces can reconstruct the original file. When a request for a file is received, the dispatcher routes the job into the $k$-shortest queues among the $L$ for which the corresponding server contains a piece of the file being requested. We establish a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem as the system becomes large (i.e. $n\to\infty$). For the central limit theorem, the limit process take values in $\mathbf{\ell}_2$, the space of square summable sequences. Due to the large size of such systems, a direct analysis of the $n$-server system is frequently intractable. The law of large numbers and diffusion approximations established in this work provide practical tools with which to perform such analysis. The Power-of-$d$ routing scheme, also known as the supermarket model, is a special case of the model considered here.

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Large Deviations for Small Noise Diffusions in a Fast Markovian Environment

A large deviation principle is established for a two-scale stochastic system in which the slow component is a continuous process given by a small noise finite dimensional Itô stochastic differential equation, and the fast component is a finite state pure jump process. Previous works have considered settings where the coupling between the components is weak in a certain sense. In the current work we study a fully coupled system in which the drift and diffusion coefficient of the slow component and the jump intensity function and jump distribution of the fast process depend on the states of both components. In addition, the diffusion can be degenerate. Our proofs use certain stochastic control representations for expectations of exponential functionals of finite dimensional Brownian motions and Poisson random measures together with weak convergence arguments. A key challenge is in the proof of the large deviation lower bound where, due to the interplay between the degeneracy of the diffusion and the full dependence of the coefficients on the two components, the associated local rate function has poor regularity properties.

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Large Deviations for Brownian Particle Systems with Killing

Particle approximations for certain nonlinear and nonlocal reaction-diffusion equations are studied using a system of Brownian motions with killing. The system is described by a collection of i.i.d. Brownian particles where each particle is killed independently at a rate determined by the empirical sub-probability measure of the states of the particles alive. A large deviation principle (LDP) for such sub-probability measure-valued processes is established. Along the way a convenient variational representation, which is of independent interest, for expectations of nonnegative functionals of Brownian motions together with an i.i.d. sequence of random variables is established. Proof of the LDP relies on this variational representation and weak convergence arguments.

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Weakly interacting particle systems on inhomogeneous random graphs

We consider weakly interacting diffusions on time varying random graphs. The system consists of a large number of nodes in which the state of each node is governed by a diffusion process that is influenced by the neighboring nodes. The collection of neighbors of a given node changes dynamically over time and is determined through a time evolving random graph process. A law of large numbers and a propagation of chaos result is established for a multi-type population setting where at each instant the interaction between nodes is given by an inhomogeneous random graph which may change over time. This result covers the setting in which the edge probabilities between any two nodes is allowed to decay to $0$ as the size of the system grows. A central limit theorem is established for the single-type population case under stronger conditions on the edge probability function.

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