Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Wiener-Hopf factorization (WHf) encompasses several important results in probability and stochastic processes, as well as in operator theory. The importance of the WHf stems not only from its theoretical appeal, manifested, in part, through probabilistic interpretation of analytical results, but also from its practical applications in a wide range of fields, such as fluctuation theory, insurance and finance. The various existing forms of the WHf for Markov chains, strong Markov processes, Levy processes, and Markov additive process, have been obtained only in the time-homogeneous case. However, there are abundant real life dynamical systems that are modeled in terms of time-inhomogenous processes, and yet the corresponding Wiener-Hopf factorization theory is not available for this important class of models. In this talk, I will first provide a survey on the development of Wiener-Hopf factorization for time-homogeneous Markov chains, Levy processes, and Markov additive processes. Then, I will discuss our recent work on WHf for time-inhomogensous Markov chains. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the WHf for time-inhomogeneous Markov processes.