Characterisation of the class of bell-shaped functions (Q2672683)

A smooth function \(f:\mathbb{R\rightarrow}[0,\infty)\) is said to be bell-shaped if \(f\) tends to zero at \(\pm\infty\) and for every \(n=0,1,2,\dots\) the \(n\)-th derivative of \(f\) changes its sign exactly \(n\) times. The paper under review offers a complete characterization of this class of functions, resembling Bernstein's identification of completely monotone functions with Laplace transforms of non-negative measures. Precisely, it is shown that every bell-shaped function is a convolution of a Pólya frequency function and an absolutely monotone-then-completely monotone function. An equivalent condition in terms of the holomorphic extension of the Fourier transform is also given. As a consequence it is shown that the bell-shaped probability distributions are infinitely divisible, and that a random walk \(X_{n}\) (or a Lévy process \(X_{t}\) ) have bell-shaped distributions if and only if the distribution of \(X_{1}\) is an extended generalized gamma convolution.