English

Convergence to scale-invariant Poisson processes and applications in Dickman approximation

Probability 2020-06-16 v3

Abstract

We study weak convergence of a sequence of point processes to a scale-invariant simple point process. For a deterministic sequence (zn)nN(z_n)_{n\in\mathbb{N}} of positive real numbers increasing to infinity as nn \to \infty and a sequence (Xk)kN(X_k)_{k\in\mathbb{N}} of independent non-negative integer-valued random variables, we consider the sequence of point processes \begin{equation*} \nu_n=\sum_{k=1}^\infty X_k \delta_{z_k/z_n}, \quad n\in \mathbb{N}, \end{equation*} and prove that, under some general conditions, it converges vaguely in distribution to a scale-invariant Poisson process ηc\eta_c on (0,)(0,\infty) with the intensity measure having the density ct1ct^{-1}, t(0,)t\in(0,\infty). An important motivating example from probabilistic number theory relies on choosing XkGeom(11/pk)X_k \sim {\rm Geom}(1-1/p_k) and zk=logpkz_k=\log p_k, kNk\in \mathbb{N}, where (pk)kN(p_k)_{k \in \mathbb{N}} is an enumeration of the primes in increasing order. We derive a general result on convergence of the integrals 01tνn(dt)\int_0^1 t \nu_n(dt) to the integral 01tηc(dt)\int_0^1 t \eta_c(dt), the latter having a generalized Dickman distribution, thus providing a new way of proving Dickman convergence results. We extend our results to the multivariate setting and provide sufficient conditions for vague convergence in distribution for a broad class of sequences of point processes obtained by mapping the points from (0,)(0,\infty) to Rd\mathbb{R}^d via multiplication by i.i.d. random vectors. In addition, we introduce a new class of multivariate Dickman distributions which naturally extends the univariate setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.06229,
  title  = {Convergence to scale-invariant Poisson processes and applications in Dickman approximation},
  author = {Chinmoy Bhattacharjee and Ilya Molchanov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.06229},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Final version, to appear in Electronic Journal of Probability

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:16:07.215Z