1. Introduction
We numerically and analytically investigate the impact of aging on exchangeable inter-arrival times in mixed renewal processes. Renewal theory focuses on stochastic systems whose temporal evolution is punctuated by events called renewals. It has been extensively examined in seminal works [
1,
2,
3] and is widely applied to reliability and survival analysis [
4,
5]. The theory does not need to specify the meaning or effect of single events, which is why renewal processes are at the core of many stochastic problems found in applied mathematics throughout many fields of science, engineering and economics [
6,
7].
The main purpose of this paper is to examine two important notions in the renewal theory of stochastic processes: the exchangeability property of inter-event times and the effect of aging on event counting. The notion of exchangeability was introduced by Bruno de Finetti [
8,
9]. Its significance is largely connected with "de Finetti’s representation theorem" and its generalized formulations, elucidating conditions connecting frequencies with subjective probabilities [
9,
10,
11]. Within the framework of renewal theory for stochastic processes, exchangeability replaces the conventional assumption of observations being "independent and identically distributed with an unknown distribution," considering exchangeable observations as a sequence of conditionally independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables. A recently introduced class of renewal processes, named mixed renewal processes, have been based on exchangeability, reflecting indifference among distinct events in a point process [
12,
13,
14]. In addition, we study statistical aging as a form of aging where there is a latency in event detection - the occurrence of an event momentarily "freezes" the detection process for a time
, the age. This "freezing" generates waiting times which can potentially alter the statistical properties of the observed inter-event time intervals [
15,
16] . If such situation occurs, the correspondent point process is said to be affected by renewal aging defined by exchangeable lifetime intervals. However, we prove that if the original sequence of inter-event time intervals is exchangeable, observational latency preserves exchangeability of the new waiting-times. Aging has been investigated in the literature on stochastic processes [
17,
18], it is observed in various physical phenomena [
19,
20,
21,
22] and manifests in many complex dynamical systems [
23,
24]. In the field of quantitative finance, reliability and renewal theory are used in the study of market micro-structure models for the estimation of arrival times of trades or orders in financial markets [
25,
26,
27,
28]. At the same time, understanding the aging behavior of time series is fundamental to studies of the stability of financial markets [
28,
29,
30]. As a case study, we analyze high-frequency data of exchange rates between currency pairs. By using a bayesian perspective on survival analysis, we observe that the aging, due to latency in recording the events, will alter the evaluation of volatility risk.
In
Section 2, we remind the reader of some of the central concepts in reliability theory and survival analysis of renewal process under exchangeability assumption of inter-event time intervals. Later, in
Section 3, we analytically assess the implications of aging on exchangeable lifetimes. We formulate aged versions of some key metrics in survival analysis of exchangeable renewal processes such as: the marginal distribution of waiting times (i.e., failure survival function), the average number of events (i.e., renewal function), and the rate of failure at any instant (hazard rate function). After the theoretical results, in
Section 4, we discuss some archetypal examples of mixed renewal processes with intrinsic fluctuations of the underlying parameters due the fact that inter-arrival times between events may exhibit variability. We compare analytical and numerical results for some exchangeable mixture models where the effect of aging on the renewal process has some interesting implications for survival analysis. At the end of section, we present some empirical findings. As case study, we investigate high-frequency financial time series and, in particular, we use currency pairs with tick-by-tick historical exchange rates, treated as conditional observations on which we apply the survival analysis for exchangeable sequences. Finally, the discussion section will summarize the results obtained and highlight the novel contribution to the literature of renewal theory and reliability analysis in a subjective perspective.
2. Preliminaries
In this section we report some fundamental definitions and propositions on exchangeability of sequences of time-interval variables in renewal processes. Later we will frame such property in the field of renewal theory for point process with inter-event times which are exchangeable rather the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.).
A sequence of inter-event time intervals is said to be exchangeable if the order of observations does not carry relevant information [
10,
31]. More precisely:
Definition 1. Let a sequence of random variables defined over the probability space , Where the sample space , the event space is a measurable subset of positive reals (namely a Borel set in ), and the probability is defined in terms of the cumulative distribution function.
A finite sequence of random variables is called exchangeable if ,
where is the group of permutations of . If the sequence is infinite, it is said to be exchangeable if the finite collection are exchangeable for every finite or every permutation
Let us notice that the equivalence in distribution,
, simply means that the two proability distribution functions are the same. So the sequence takes values in a standard Borel space
where
is the positive reals and
is all of the Borel subsets of the positive reals. Exchangeability generalizes the notion of a sequence of random variables being independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and, in frequentist approach to statistics, observed data is assumed to be generated by a series of i.i.d. random variables with distribution parameterized by some unknown parameter which, on the contrary from a Bayesian perspective, it has some prior distribution, so the random variables which give the data are no longer independent. The representation theorem states that any infinite exchangeable sequence of random variables is a mixture of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) sequences, in the sense of the following proposition which covers the general case for real-valued exchangeable random quantities as in [
11,
32,
33] known as generalized de Finetti’s theorem:
Proposition 1 (representation theorem).
Consider an infinitely exchangeable sequence , there exists a probability de Finetti’s measure μ over the space of all distribution functions on , such that the joint distribution function of the sequence has the form:
with μ is the probability distribution of the empirical random distribution defined by .
The previous proposition implies that we should proceed as if the observations
are independent conditional on
F, an unknown cumulative distribution (an infinite-dimensional parameter), with a belief distribution
for
F, having the operational interpretation in eq.(
2) of what we believe the empirical distribution function would look like for a large sample. This means that infinite sequences of exchangeable random variables can be regarded equivalently as sequences of conditionally i.i.d. random variables, based on some underlying distributional form described by the de Finetti probability measure
. Note that this equivalence does not quite hold for finite exchangeability. In the sense that there are finite exchangeable sequences which cannot be represented as a mixture of i.i.d. processes. However, they can be modeled as approximately being conditionally i.i.d. as shown in [
34,
35,
36] under the condition that the sample size
where
k are the first outcomes of the sample of size
n in a sampling scheme of drawing without replacement. In the trivial case, when the sequence is generated by a de Finetti mixture with a degenerate mixing distribution, i.e., when
, with
denoting a unit point mass at
a, then the sequence is (unconditionally) i.i.d. So, it is evident how the condition of exchangeability is weaker than independence but it is stronger than the identically distributed property. The close relationship between exchangeable sequences of random variables and the i.i.d. allows the application of the law of large numbers to the empirical distributon function as follows [
37,
38,
39]:
Proposition 2.
For any distribution given , the empirical distribution can be written as:
where is the empirical distribution function defined by the first n random variables . Then it holds that the limiting empirical distribution function:
which exists almost surely, so the empirical distribution is a sufficient statistic for the unknown ‘parameter’ F.
This is particularly interesting when combined with de Finetti’s theorem 1 then by the law of large numbers (which we apply after conditioning on the draw ), the unknown (random) distribution F can be recovered from the observed sequence by taking the limit of its empirical distribution. In conclusion, the empirical distribution functions are sufficient statistics for the sequence , in the sense that probabilities conditional on the cumulative counting depend only on , and are independent of the choice of exchangeable P which assigns the same probability to any two exchangeable patterns. Furthermore, the probability distribution represents the beliefs about the outcomes about i.e., through the empirical distribution .
In what follows we recall the class of exchangeable mixed renewal processes as studied in [
12,
13,
14]. Let us consider a counting process
that counts the number of some type of events occurring during a time interval
and let us suppose
are random times at which a certain event occurs. The time elapsed between consecutive events are random variables represent the inter-occurrence times
. The
are called renewal times, and
are the inter-event time intervals, and
is the number of renewal events in
.
Definition 2 (exchangeable renewal point processes).
Let the inter-renewal times be a sequence of nonnegative exchangeable random variables with de Finetti’s measure μ, and empirical distribution F, such that . Labeling to be the epoch of the nth occurrence given by the sum: , then the arrival process defined as:
is an exchangeable (or mixed) renewal counting process.
In other words,
counts the number of renewal events in
and since
then
where
. According to the above assumptions and definitions for renewal processes under exchangeability, the latency assessment in renewal sequences is studied in the following
Section 3. Another important function of interest in survival analysis is the so called renewal function
which represents the expected numbers of renewals in an interval
for a renewal process with underlying distribution
F. The renewal function can be recovered from [
12] to be:
where
is the conditional renewal function and
denotes the n-fold convolution of
F. The previous relation shows as the renewal function, in the exchangeable case, is a weighted average of independent renewal functions, where the weight is given through the de Finetti’s measure
.
Bayesian analysis frequently employs a mixture modeling paradigm [
11,
40,
41] where, in many practical cases, the attention is often focused on representing data in terms of a finite-dimensional parameter
rather than an infinite-dimensional label
F. Therefore, it is useful to write the generalized de Finetti representation theorem in its parametric version as:
Proposition 3.
Under the conditions as in Proposition 1, if the distribution function F is indexed by some parameter , with probability distribution , then the joint distribution function of can be written as:
where denotes the a priori probability density on θ, when defined, and is the parametric model labeled by the parameter θ.
In other words, when data is considered exchangeable, it implies that the data constitutes a random sample from a probability model, and there exists a prior distribution over the parameters of that model. Consequently, de Finetti’s representation theorem is frequently regarded as the fundamental motivation for Bayesian analysis.
At this point, we have shown all the necessary notions to discuss the statistical aging effect on point processes with exchangeable inter-event time intervals (i.e., renewal failures).
3. Statistical Aging in Mixed Renewal Processes
Statistical aging [
42,
43,
44] is defined as the property of dynamical systems and stochastic processes to depend on time of the measurement indicated as
respect to the time of occurrence of events. Such measurement time represents the time when detection system is temporary unable to reveal a new event, since it is "blind" for a time
(latency period) after the last revealed event, so one has to evaluate the waiting time before the occurrence of the next event by setting the observation time at a distance
from each and every previous recorded event. The analysis begins by considering the sequence of event occurrence times:
. Given an aging time
, for each time
we record the first time of the sequence at a distance from
equal to or larger than
:
. Then we record the time distance
which we call waiting times, and they coincides with inter-event times when
. Then the procedure continues for all the times of the sequence
. At this point, as last step, we reshuffle (permutation sampling) the aged sequenced so we have a new sequence
which is a permutation of the original aged sequence
.
Figure 1 illustrates how to make the renewal latency assessment for a sequence of events. We move a window of size
along the time series, locating the left size of the window on the time of occurrence of an event. The window size prevents us from assessing if there are or not events before the end of the window. We record the time distance between the end of the window and the occurrence time of the first event that we can perceive.
It is evident that the times that we record are portions of the original waiting times. In this case the aging experiment illustrated by Figure(
Figure 1), generating only fractions of the original inter-event time interval, has the effect favoring the long-time periods, and the short-time periods are affected much more from the delayed observation. Consequently we introduce a mathematical formalization of the latency assessment through the aging experiment as follows:
Definition 3 (aging). The operator , where , is the aging operator defined by taking a sequence to , with , where and is the least number such that . If no such exists, then aging results in the empty sequence. Similarly, assuming have been found, , where and is the smallest integer such that . If no such integer exists, then the sequence ends at
Note that there are different possible conventions as to the distance between the event pertaining to the end of one aged interevent time and the the beginning of the window from which the next is counted. We have chosen one that makes the proof of exchangeablility more succinct.
Theorem 1 (aging preserves exchangeability). Let be the latency period in the aging experiment. Given an exchangeable sequence , the corresponding aged sequence is also exchangeable for any
Proof. Let
be an arbitrary permutation and
be the corresponding permutation that preserves the blocks of indices in the aging construction (e.g.,
in cycle notation, and
implies
, or
with the same blocks of indices yields
). Then by using the definition of the aging operator, one has that
where the middle equality holds since the exchangeablility of
implies that for every
one has
which implies the equivalence of the above distributions since the blocks of random variables do not overlap. Since
was arbitrary in the above equations, they hold for all
. Thus,
is exchangeable. □
So, in words, the property of exchangeability of waiting times between consecutive events is preserved under the latency assessment and the arrival process can be re-written as with and where the epoch of the nth waiting time is . We denote with the aged cumulative distribution function of waiting times of a point process. It represents the probability that, given that a latency period , the time until the next event is less than or equal to , or, equivalently, the probability that the next event occurs within the time interval . Consequently, for an aged -renewal process, similarly to proposition 2, the aged probability measure is the limiting distribution of the aged empirical cumulative function . Despite that, the aged sequence according to the representation theorem is equivalent to a conditionally i.i.d. random variables that, however, could be affected in some of their statistical properties respect to the non-aged case.
Let us now focus on the effect of aging on the empirical distribution function of the aged exchangeable sequences, so to find a relation between the aged distribution function and the non aged one . The following theorem will provide an implicit analytical derivation of such aged CDF.
Theorem 2.
Let τ be an exchangeable random variable with an absolutely continuous cumulative distribution function F. Let be a double laplace trasform of the CDF respect to the variable u (conjugate of τ) and the variable (conjugate of ). The aged unconditional CDF of the aged process at a latency period can be written, in a double Laplace space, as the marginal distribution of mixed type:
Proof. Let
be the CDF of an aged process, one can decompose the possible scenarios for the occurence of events in the aging window into the cases in which no events occur and those in which at least one event occurs, as along the lines of [
45,
46]. In the first case, the probability of observing at most a time t before the first event after
is
. By integrating over the nuisance variable
x, the second case has a probability given by an integral of the renewal function with the complement of the CDF as
, where the sum of convolutions takes into account all the possible sequences of intervals of time with no event before a new event eventually occurs i.e.,
where
. So, since
F is absolutely continuous, its derivative indicates the probability that the last of
n events occurs at the given time. And
is the rate of events
as defined from eq.(
6). The final result gives
as the distribution for a first observed event at time
t. The equation for
can be written in terms of the Laplace-Stieltjes transformations which are used to transform functions which possess both discrete and continuous parts, and in the case of probability distribution functions the double lapalce transform is defined as
whenever that integral exist [
47,
48]. The intergal reduces to the standard Laplace transform in the fully continuous case. Moreover, since
, the convolution can be written as
and consequently the joint distribution factorizes in Laplace space, and we can finally write:
□
From the previous theorems we can directly derive many propositions which are of practical use in reliability theory and survival analysis of renewal processes. Let us write the aged-probability density function in the parametric version as:
Corollary 1.
If the de Finetti measure μ is induced by a parametric construction, we can write the aged distribution functions:
Under absolutely continuous assumption of the cdf, the probability denisty function of the aged process at a latency period can be written in Laplace space as:
Let us notice that, in the degenerate case of i.i.d. sequences then eq.(1) recovers the known expression for ordinary renewal process [
18,
49] i.e.,
.
Renewal function for aged processes represents the expected numbers of renewals for a renewal process with underlying lifetime distribution F. In particular, after aging the following statement holds:
Proposition 4.
The aged mixed renewal function at a latency period can be written as the mean rate of events which is the expected number of renewals between time .
Proof. The result is derived directly from the de Finetti’s representation theorem and from the defintion of the renewal function
as in eq.(
6) we can write in the parametric version of the de Finetti measure as:
that in the case of aged process, it can be written in one variable laplace space:
□
In the case of no aging, i.e., latency
, the eq.(
6) for the renewal function
can be written as:
Let us observe that in the degenerate case of the de Finetti measure, , one recovers the usual renewal function with i.i.d. inter-renewal times so that the renewal function is .
At this point, let us describe the effect of latency assessment on a mixed renewal process by comparing the brand-new distribution (where there is no latency) and the aged distribution with a given latency period :
Definition 4. Let be the sequence of inter-event time intervals of a renewal counting process and let be the sequence of waiting times after the aging experiment of a latency period .
Then, the mixed renewal process is said to be characterized by renewalneutralaging if:
and the mixed renewal process is said to be characterized by renewaleffectualaging if
that is, the unconditional empirical distribution function at given latency period , is not the same as the unconditional empirical distribution of inter-event time intervals of the original (brand-new) renewal process.
So, the aged empirical distribution function
is still a sufficient statistic for exchangeability of the correspondent aged
-renewal point process, but it does not necessarily converges to the same limiting distribution function as for the original non-aged process
F. However if a process is renewal it is renewal for the all ages. If, on the contrary, the process is not renewal but the eq.(
16) is still verified then the process is characterized by a non-renewal effectual aging. Let us notice that in the case of a null latency,
, we recover the ordinary result of
.
Concept of aging describes how a system or a process improves or deteriorates in relation to the latency period and it can be restated in terms to stochastic ordering between waiting-times sequence respect and the brand-new inter-event time intervals (i.e., waiting times where
) in a subjective aging framework [
50,
51]. Let us observe that the case of no aging (”neutral aging”) in renewal processes implies that the distribution of the waiting times for an occurrence (the time until the next event from the observation time) is not affected by the latency period. Consequently all stochastic orders based on CDF used in reliability theory will result to be neutral.
For the sake of completeness, we will write now the expression of the hazard function (or failure rate) for aged mixed renewal processes under statistical aging. The hazard function is an important notion often used as criteria of aging in renewal processes and it represents a conditional density, given that the event in question has not yet occurred prior to time
t. Usually, the failure rate of a system depends on time with the rate varying over the life cycle of the system. Let us call
S the survival function (also known as reliability function) which is simply the complementary of the cumulative density function (i.e., life distribution)
. In particular case of aged exchangeable inter-failure times [
50,
52], the hazard function for aged mixed renewal processes has the following property:
Proposition 5.
In the absolutely continuous case, the (unconditional) hazard rate function for aged mixed renewal process, with exchangeable inter-failure intervals under statistical aging, can be written as:
Moreover, the mean residual lifetime can be written as:
where
The function can be interpreted by the Bayes formula to be the conditional density of θ given the observation of the survival .
Proof. Let us remind that
is the conditional cumulative hazard rate, and the conditional (instantaneous) hazard rate to be
. Consequently the survival distribution and its probility density can be expressed in terms of those functions as:
and
Finally, considering the definition
the proposition follows. A regard with the mean residual lifetime for aged mixed renewal process, we have
□
Let us notice that both the failure rate function and the mean residual lifetime are conditional concepts, since they are are conditioned on survival to time t. Notice that also for the aged hazard rate we found that it is a mixture of the conditional hazard rate functions . But, differently from what happens for probability distribution F and renewal function , the prior distribution this time is , which varies with t. This fact has important consequences in the study of aging properties of exchangeable failure time intervals as a mixture of conditional i.i.d. variables.