Stochastic Approximations of Set-Valued Dynamical Systems: Convergence with Positive Probability to an Attractor

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.1100.0455

A successful method to describe the asymptotic behavior of a discrete time stochastic process governed by some recursive formula is to relate it to the limit sets of a well-chosen mean differential equation. Under an attainability condition, Benaïm proved that convergence to a given attractor of the flow induced by this dynamical system occurs with positive probability for a class of Robbins Monro algorithms. Benaïm, Hofbauer, and Sorin generalised this approach for stochastic approximation algorithms whose average behavior is related to a differential inclusion instead. We pursue the analogy by extending to this setting the result of convergence with positive probability to an attractor.

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