Random perturbations of recursive sequences with an application to an epidemic model

Abstract

We investigate the asymptotic sample path behaviour of a randomly perturbed discrete-time dynamical system. We consider the case where the trajectories of the non-perturbed dynamical system are attracted by a finite number of limit sets and characterize a case where this property remains valid for the perturbed dynamical system when the perturbation converges to zero. For this purpose, no further assumptions on the perturbation are needed and our main condition applies to the limit sets of the non-perturbed dynamical system. When the limit sets reduce to limit points we show that this main condition is more general than the usual assumption of the existence of a Lyapunov function for the non-perturbed dynamical system. An application to an epidemic model is given to illustrate our results.