On the kinetic equation of linear fractional stable motion and applications to modeling the scaling of intermittent bursts

Abstract

Levy flights and fractional Brownian motion (fBm) have become exemplars of the heavy tailed jumps and long-ranged memory widely seen in physics. Natural time series frequently combine both effects, and linear fractional stable motion (lfsm) is a model process of this type, combining alpha-stable jumps with a memory kernel. In contrast complex physical spatiotemporal diffusion processes where both the above effects compete have for many years been modelled using the fully fractional (FF) kinetic equation for the continuous time random walk (CTRW), with power laws in the pdfs of both jump size and waiting time. We derive the analogous kinetic equation for lfsm and show that it has a diffusion coefficient with a power law in time rather than having a fractional time derivative like the CTRW. We discuss some preliminary results on the scaling of burst "sizes" and "durations" in lfsm time series, with applications to modelling existing observations in space physics and elsewhere.