Elements of Stochastic Processes

A guiding principle was to be as rigorous as possible without the use of measure theory. Some of the topics contained herein are: · Fundamental limit theorems such as the weak and strong laws of large numbers, the central limit theorem, as well as the monotone, dominated, and bounded convergence theorems · Markov chains with finitely many states · Random walks on Z, Z2 and Z3 · Arrival processes and Poisson point processes · Brownian motion, including basic properties of Brownian paths such as continuity but lack of differentiability · An introductory look at stochastic calculus including a version of Ito’s formula with applications to finance, and a development of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with an application to economics