Renewal Theory

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Renewal theory is the branch of probability theory that generalizes Poisson processes for arbitrary holding times. Applications include calculating the expected time for a monkey who is randomly tapping at a keyboard to type the word Macbeth and comparing the long-term benefits of different insurance policies. A renewal process is a generalization of the Poisson process. In essence, the Poisson process is a continuous-time Markov process on the positive integers (usually starting at zero) which has independent identically distributed holding times at each integer i (exponentially distributed) before advancing (with probability 1) to the next integer:i + 1. In the same informal spirit, we may define a renewal process to be the same thing, except that the holding times take on a more general distribution. (Note however that the IID property of the holding times is retained).... Mehr