Joint simulation of backward and forward recurrence times in a renewal process

Abstract

It is shown that, in a renewal process with inter-arrival distribution F, an observation from the asymptotic (when t →∞) joint distribution of backward and forward recurrence times at t can be simulated by simulating an observation of the pair (UW, (1 – U)W), where U and W are independent random variables with U ~ uniform(0, 1) and W distributed according to the length-biased version of F.