Regularity and Recurrence of Switching Diffusions

Abstract

This work is concerned with switching diffusion processes, also known as regime-switching diffusions. Our attention focuses on regularity, recurrence, and positive recurrence of the underlying stochastic processes. The main effort is devoted to obtaining easily verifiable conditions for the aforementioned properties. Continuous-state-dependent jump processes are considered. First general criteria on regularity and recurrence using Liapunov functions are obtained. Then we focus on a class of problems, in which both the drift and the diffusion coefficients are “linearizable” with respect to the continuous state, and suppose that the generator of the jump part of the process can be approximated by a generator of an ergodic Markov chain. Sufficient conditions for regularity, recurrence, and positive recurrence are derived, which are linear combination of the averaged coefficients (averaged with respect to the stationary measure of the Markov chain).