COMPUTATIONAL METHODS FOR RANDOM DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONSTHEORY AND APPLICATIONS

Zusammenfassung

Ever since the early contributions by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jacob and Johann Bernoulli in the XVII century until now, difference and differential equations have uninterruptedly demonstrated their capability to model successfully interesting complex problems in Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Epidemiology, Economics, etc. But, from a practical standpoint, the application of difference or differential equations requires setting their inputs (coefficients, source term, initial and boundary conditions) using sampled data, thus containing uncertainty stemming from measurement errors. In addition, there are some random external factors which can affect to the system under study. Then, it is more advisable to consider input data as random variables or stochastic processes rather than deterministic constants or functions, respectively. Under this consideration random difference and differential equations appear. This thesis makes a trail by solving, from a probabilistic point of view, different types of random difference and differential equations, applying fundamentally the Random Variable Transformation method. This technique is an useful tool to obtain the probability density function of a random vector that results from mapping another random vector whose probability density function is known. Definitely, the goal of this dissertation is the computation of the first probability density function of the solution stochastic process in different problems, which are based on random difference or differential equations. The interest in determining the first probability density function is justified because this deterministic function characterizes the one-dimensional probabilistic information, as mean, variance, asymmetry, kurtosis, etc. of corresponding solution of a random difference or differential equation. It also allows to determine the probability of a certain event of interest that involves the solution. In addition, in some cases, the theoretical study carried out is completed, showing its application to modelling problems with real data, where the problem of parametric statistics distribution estimation is addressed in the context of random difference and differential equations.