Size bias occurs famously in waiting-time paradoxes, undesirably in sampling schemes, and unexpectedly in connection with Stein’s method, tightness, analysis of the lognormal distribution, Skorohod embedding, infinite divisibility, branching processes, and number theory. In this paper we review the basics and survey some of these unexpected connections.

The quadratic variation of Gaussian processes plays an important role in both stochastic analysis and in applications such as estimation of model parameters, and for this reason the topic has been extensively studied in the literature. In this article we study the convergence of quadratic sums of general Gaussian sequences. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for different types of convergence including convergence in probability, almost sure convergence, $L^{p}$-convergence as well as weak convergence. We use a practical and simple approach which simplifies the existing methodology considerably. As an application, we show how convergence of the quadratic variation of a given process can be obtained by an appropriate choice of the underlying sequence.

This paper explores the equivalences between four definitions of uniform large deviations principles and uniform Laplace principles found in the literature. Counterexamples are presented to illustrate the differences between these definitions and specific conditions are described under which these definitions are equivalent to each other. A fifth definition called the equicontinuous uniform Laplace principle (EULP) is proposed and proven to be equivalent to Freidlin and Wentzell’s definition of a uniform large deviations principle. Sufficient conditions that imply a measurable function of infinite dimensional Wiener process satisfies an EULP using the variational methods of Budhiraja, Dupuis and Maroulas are presented. This theory is applied to prove that a family of Hilbert space valued stochastic equations exposed to multiplicative noise satisfy a uniform large deviations principle that is uniform over all initial conditions in bounded subsets of the Hilbert space, and under stronger assumptions is uniform over initial conditions in unbounded subsets too. This is an improvement over previous weak convergence methods which can only prove uniformity over compact sets.

We review recent results on the metastable behavior of continuous-time Markov chains derived through the characterization of Markov chains as unique solutions of martingale problems.

We overview results on the topic of Poisson approximation that are missed in existing surveys. The main attention is paid to the problem of Poisson approximation to the distribution of a sum of Bernoulli and, more generally, non-negative integer-valued random variables.

We do not restrict ourselves to a particular method, and overview the whole range of issues including the general limit theorem, estimates of the accuracy of approximation, asymptotic expansions, etc. Related results on the accuracy of compound Poisson approximation are presented as well.

We indicate a number of open problems and discuss directions of further research.

In this paper we analyze the equilibrium properties of a large class of stochastic processes describing the fundamental biological process within bacterial cells, the production process of proteins. Stochastic models classically used in this context to describe the time evolution of the numbers of mRNAs and proteins are presented and discussed. An extension of these models, which includes elongation phases of mRNAs and proteins, is introduced. A convergence result to equilibrium for the process associated to the number of proteins and mRNAs is proved and a representation of this equilibrium as a functional of a Poisson process in an extended state space is obtained. Explicit expressions for the first two moments of the number of mRNAs and proteins at equilibrium are derived, generalizing some classical formulas. Approximations used in the biological literature for the equilibrium distribution of the number of proteins are discussed and investigated in the light of these results. Several convergence results for the distribution of the number of proteins at equilibrium are in particular obtained under different scaling assumptions.