First passage under restart with branching

Abstract

First passage under restart with branching is proposed as a generalization of first passage under restart. Strong motivation to study this generalization comes from the observation that restart with branching can expedite the completion of processes that cannot be expedited with simple restart; yet a sharp and quantitative formulation of this statement is still lacking. We develop a comprehensive theory of first passage under restart with branching. This reveals that two widely applied measures of statistical dispersion---the coefficient of variation and the Gini index---come together to determine how restart with branching affects the mean completion time of an arbitrary stochastic process. The universality of this result is demonstrated and its connection to extreme value theory is also pointed out and explored.