constant rate distributions on partially ordered sets恒定速率分布在半序集.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2010, Article ID 675754, 21 pages doi:10.1155/2010/675754 Research Article Constant Rate Distributions on Partially Ordered Sets Kyle Siegrist Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Kyle Siegrist, siegrist@ Received 5 April 2010; Revised 2 August 2010; Accepted 30 August 2010 Academic Editor: Rongling Wu Copyright q 2010 Kyle Siegrist. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We consider probability distributions with constant rate on partially ordered sets, generalizing distributions in the usual reliability setting 0, ∞, ≤ that have constant failure rate. In spite of the minimal algebraic structure, there is a surprisingly rich theory, including moment results and results concerning ladder variables and point processes. We concentrate mostly on discrete posets, particularly posets whose graphs are rooted trees. We pose some questions on the existence of constant rate distributions for general discrete posets. 1. Preliminaries 1.1. Introduction The exponential distribution on 0, ∞ and the geometric distribution on N are characterized by the constant rate property: the density function with respect to Lebesgue measure in the first case and counting measure in the second is a multiple of the upper right-tail distribution function. The natural mathematical home for the constant rate property is a partially ordered set poset with a reference measure for the density