It is well-known that in a small Pólya urn, i.e., an urn where the second largest real part of an eigenvalue is at most half the largest eigenvalue, the distribution of the numbers of balls of different colours in the urn is asymptotically normal under weak additional conditions. We consider the balanced case, and then give asymptotics of the mean and the covariance matrix, showing that after appropriate normalization, the mean and covariance matrix converge to the mean and covariance matrix of the limiting normal distribution.

We develop shock model theory in different scenarios for the ℳ-class of life distributions introduced by Klar and Müller (2003). We also study the cumulative damage model of A-Hameed and Proschan (1975) in the context of ℳ-class and establish analogous results. We obtain moment bounds and explore weak convergence issues within the ℳ-class of life distributions.

Consider a sum ∑1 N Y i of random variables conditioned on a given value of the sum ∑1 N X i of some other variables, where X i and Y i are dependent but the pairs (X i ,Y i ) form an i.i.d. sequence. We consider here the case when each X i is discrete. We prove, for a triangular array ((X ni ,Y ni )) of such pairs satisfying certain conditions, both convergence of the distribution of the conditioned sum (after suitable normalization) to a normal distribution, and convergence of its moments. The results are motivated by an application to hashing with linear probing; we give also some other applications to occupancy problems, random forests, and branching processes.

We show that a theory for stopped two-dimensional random walks is well suited to describe cumulative shock models. Limit theorems for the lifetime/failure time of a system are provided.

The strong law of large numbers of the Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund type is established for the total population in a subcritical branching process with immigration. The moment convergence of the total population is obtained under appropriate moment conditions on the offspring distribution and the immigration distribution.