On the local times of noise reinforced Bessel processes (Q6159734)

The notion of stochastic reinforcement refers to certain modifications of the dynamics of a given random process, such that, depending on whether the reinforcement is positive or negative, some of its previous steps are either more likely or less likely to be repeated in the future. In the continuous time setting, the name noise reinforcement is meant to suggest that reinforcement acts on the increments of the process over infinitesimal time intervals. In the paper under consideration, similarly to a noise reinforced Brownian motion, the author introduces a noise reinforced Bessel process and investigates the effects of noise reinforcement on a Bessel process of dimension \(d\in(0, 2)\), and more specifically, on the asymptotic behavior of its additive functionals. One of the results states that the reinforcement parameter \(p\) does not play a great role. In particular, noise reinforcement does not affect the growth exponent of additive functionals. Instead, the impact of noise reinforcement is perceived at the level of the distribution of the local time \(\hat{L}\). How to properly define the local time \(\hat{L}\) and its inverse for the noise reinforced processes, is at the heart of this work. The inverse becomes an increasing self-similar (time-homogeneous) Markov process, and from this, several explicit results are deduced. In particular, the two-parameter family of local times according to time \(t\) and level \(x\) are constructed as occupation densities, and their regularity is studied.