Let $X$ be a real Lévy process and let $\Xpos $ be the process conditioned to stay positive. We assume that $ 0 $ is regular for $(-\infty, 0)$ and $(0, +\infty) $ with respect to $X$. Using elementary excursion theory arguments, we provide a simple probabilistic description of the reversed paths of $X$ and $\Xpos $ at their first hitting time of $ (x, +\infty)$ and last passage time of $ (-\infty, x ] $, on a fixed time interval $[0, t]$, for a positive level $x$. From these reversion formulas, we derive an extension to general Lévy processes of Williams' decomposition theorems, Bismut's decomposition of the excursion above the infimum and also several relations involving the reversed excursion under the maximum.
Motivated by the recent results of Nualart and Xu \cite{Nualart} concerning limits laws for occupation times of one dimensional symmetric stable processes, this paper proves a decomposition for functionals of one dimensional symmetric Lévy processes under certain conditions on the characteristic exponent and computes the moments of the decomposition.
In this paper we generalize known workload decomposition results for Lévy queues with secondary jump inputs and queues with server vacations or service interruptions. Special cases are polling systems with either compound Poisson or more general Lévy inputs. Our main tools are new martingale results, which have been derived in a companion paper.
We study the convergence in distribution of the supremum of the local time and of the favorite site for a transient diffusion in a spectrally negative Lévy potential. To do so, we study the h-valleys of a spectrally negative Lévy process, and we prove in partiular that the renormalized sequence of the h-minima converges to the jumping times sequence of a standard Poisson process.
Path decomposition is performed to analyze the pre-supremum, post-supremum, post-infimum and the intermediate processes of a spectrally negative Levy process taken up to an independent exponential time T as motivated by the aim of finding the joint distribution of the maximum loss and maximum gain. In addition, the joint distribution of the supremum and the infimum before an exponential time is displayed. As an application of path decomposition, the distributions of supremum of the post-infimum process and the maximum loss of the post-supremum process are obtained.
A step reinforced random walk is a discrete time process with memory such that at each time step, with fixed probability $p \in (0,1)$, it repeats a previously performed step chosen uniformly at random while with complementary probability $1-p$, it performs an independent step with fixed law. In the continuum, the main result of Bertoin in [7] states that the random walk constructed from the discrete-time skeleton of a Lévy process for a time partition of mesh-size $1/n$ converges, as $n \uparrow \infty$ in the sense of finite dimensional distributions, to a process $\hatξ$ referred to as a no…
We investigate two hedging problems in exponential Lévy models. First, we provide an explicit representation for the Föllmer--Schweizer decomposition of European type options under mild conditions, which implies a closed-form expression of the corresponding local risk-minimizing strategies. Secondly, we discretize stochastic integrals driven by an exponential Lévy process using a jump correction method. The convergence rate of the resulting discretization error as the expected number of discretization times increases is measured in weighted BMO spaces, implying also $L_p$-estimates, $p \in (2,…
We consider rough paths with jumps. In particular, the analogue of Lyons' extension theorem and rough integration are established in a jump setting, offering a pathwise view on stochastic integration against cadlag processes. A class of Levy rough paths is introduced and characterized by a sub-ellipticity condition on the left-invariant diffusion vector fields and and a certain integrability property of the Carnot--Caratheodory norm with respect to the Levy measure on the group, using Hunt's framework of Lie group valued Levy processes. Examples of Levy rough paths include standard multi-dimen…
In this paper, we are concerned with the representation of an important sublinear expectation under which framework a new stochastic process G-Lévy process has been introduced. We show the existence of a weakly compact family of probability measures to give the representation by using two different methods.
In the paper, we consider a type of stochastic differential equations driven by G-Lévy processes. We prove that a kind of their additive functionals has path independence and extend some known results.
We study the small-time asymptotics of sample paths of Lévy processes and Lévy-type processes. Namely, we investigate under which conditions the limit $$\limsup_{t \to 0} \frac{1}{f(t)} |X_t-X_0|$$ is finite resp.\ infinite with probability $1$. We establish integral criteria in terms of the infinitesimal characteristics and the symbol of the process. Our results apply to a wide class of processes, including solutions to Lévy-driven SDEs and stable-like processes. For the particular case of Lévy processes, we recover and extend earlier results from the literature. Moreover, we present a new ma…
We consider a Lévy process $Y(t)$ that is not permanently observed, but rather inspected at Poisson($ω$) moments only, over an exponentially distributed time $T_β$ with parameter $β$. The focus lies on the analysis of the distribution of the running maximum at such inspection moments up to $T_β$, denoted by $Y_{β,ω}$. Our main result is a decomposition: we derive a remarkable distributional equality that contains $Y_{β,ω}$ as well as the running maximum process $\bar Y(t)$ at the exponentially distributed times $T_β$ and $T_{β+ω}$. Concretely, $\overline{Y}(T_β)$ can be written the sum of the …
We present a satisfactory definition of the important class of Lévy processes indexed by a general collection of sets. We use a new definition for increment stationarity of set-indexed processes to obtain different characterizations of this class. As an example, the set-indexed compound Poisson process is introduced. The set-indexed Lévy process is characterized by infinitely divisible laws and a Lévy-Khintchine representation. Moreover, the following concepts are discussed: projections on flows, Markov properties, and pointwise continuity. Finally the study of sample paths leads to a Lévy-Itô…
We show that the general Lévy process can be embedded in a suitable Fock space, classified by cocycles of the real line regarded as a group, ${\bf R}$. The formula of de Finetti corresponds to coboundaries. Kolmogorov's processes correspond to cocycles of which the derivatives are cocycles of the Lie algebra of ${\bf R}$. Lévy's formula gives the most general cocycle possible.
We analyze the general Lévy insurance risk process for Lévy measures in the convolution equivalence class $\mathcal{S}^{(α)}$, $α>0$, via a new kind of path decomposition. This yields a very general functional limit theorem as the initial reserve level $u\to \infty$, and a host of new results for functionals of interest in insurance risk. Particular emphasis is placed on the time to ruin, which is shown to have a proper limiting distribution, as $u\to \infty$, conditional on ruin occurring under our assumptions. Existing asymptotic results under the $\mathcal{S}^{(α)}$ assumption are synthesiz…
We consider random walks and Lévy processes in a homogeneous group $G$. For all $p > 0$, we completely characterise (almost) all $G$-valued Lévy processes whose sample paths have finite $p$-variation, and give sufficient conditions under which a sequence of $G$-valued random walks converges in law to a Lévy process in $p$-variation topology. In the case that $G$ is the free nilpotent Lie group over $\mathbb{R}^d$, so that processes of finite $p$-variation are identified with rough paths, we demonstrate applications of our results to weak convergence of stochastic flows and provide a Lévy-Khint…
The Levy transform of a Brownian motion B is the Brownian motion B't, the integral over (O,t) of sign of Bs with respect to dBs. Call T the corresponding transformation on the Wiener space W. We establish that a.s. the orbit of w in W under T is dense in W for the compact uniform convergence topology.
This a free translation with additional explanations of {\em Processus à Accroissement Independants Chapitre I: La Décomposition de Paul Lévy}, by J.L. Bretagnolle, in {\em Ecole d'Eté de Probabilités}, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 307, Springer 1973. The Lévy-Khintchine representation of infinitely divisible distributions is obtained as a by-product. As this proof makes use of martingale methods, it is pedagogically more suitable for students of financial mathematics than some other approaches. It is hoped that the end notes will also help to make the proof more accessible to this audience.
It is well known that between all processes with independent increments, essentially only the Brownian motion and the Poisson process possess the chaotic representation property (CRP). Thus, a natural question appears: What is an appropriate analog of the CRP in the case of a general Lévy process. At least three approaches are possible here. The first one, due to Itô, uses the CRP of the Brownian motion and the Poisson process, as well as the representation of a Lévy process through those processes. The second approach, due to Nualart and Schoutens, consists in representing any square-integrab…
We investigate the space-time regularity of the local time associated to Volterra-Lévy processes, including Volterra processes driven by $α$-stable processes for $α\in(0,2]$. We show that the spatial regularity of the local time for Volterra-Lévy process is $P$-a.s. inverse proportionally to the singularity of the associated Volterra kernel. We apply our results to the investigation of path-wise regularizing effects obtained by perturba\Ption of ODEs by a Volterra-Lévy process which has sufficiently regular local time. Following along the lines of [15], we show existence, uniqueness and differ…
In this paper, we will prove that the local time of a Lévy process is of finite $p$-variation in the space variable in the classical sense, a.s. for any $p>2$, $t\geq 0$, if the Lévy measure satisfies $\int_{R\setminus \{0\}}(|y|^{3\over 2}\wedge 1)n(dy)<\infty$, and is a rough path of roughness $p$ a.s. for any $2<p<3$ under a slightly stronger condition for the Lévy measure. Then for any function $g$ of finite $q$-variation ($1\leq q <3$), we establish the integral $\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}g(x)dL_t^x$ as a Young integral when $1\leq q<2$ and a Lyons' rough path integral when $2\leq q<3$. We t…
Limit theorems for the normalized laws with respect to two kinds of weight functionals are studied for any symmetric stable Lévy process of index $ 1 < α\le 2 $. The first kind is a function of the local time at the origin, and the second kind is the exponential of an occupation time integral. Special emphasis is put on the role played by a stable Lévy counterpart of the universal $ σ$-finite measure, found in [9] and [10], which unifies the corresponding limit theorems in the Brownian setup for which $ α=2 $.
Let $X$ be a Lévy process with regularly varying Lévy measure $ν$. We obtain sample-path large deviations for scaled processes $\bar X_n(t) \triangleq X(nt)/n$ and obtain a similar result for random walks. Our results yield detailed asymptotic estimates in scenarios where multiple big jumps in the increment are required to make a rare event happen; we illustrate this through detailed conditional limit theorems. In addition, we investigate connections with the classical large deviations framework. In that setting, we show that a weak large deviation principle (with logarithmic speed) holds, but…
We study a one-dimensional stochastic differential equation driven by a stable Lévy process of order $α$ with drift and diffusion coefficients $b,σ$. When $α\in (1,2)$, we investigate pathwise uniqueness for this equation. When $α\in (0,1)$, we study another stochastic differential equation, which is equivalent in law, but for which pathwise uniqueness holds under much weaker conditions. We obtain various results, depending on whether $α\in (0,1)$ or $α\in (1,2)$ and on whether the driving stable process is symmetric or not. Our assumptions involve the regularity and monotonicity of $b$ and $σ…
We consider a spectrally positive Lévy process $X$ that does not drift to $+\infty$, viewed as coding for the genealogical structure of a (sub)critical branching process, in the sense of a contour or exploration process \cite{GaJa98,Lam10}. We denote by $I$ the past infimum process defined for each $t\geq 0$ by $I_t:= \inf_{[0,t]} X$ and we let $γ$ be the unique time at which the excursion of the reflected process $X-I$ away from 0 attains its supremum. We prove that the pre-$γ$ and the post-$γ$ subpaths of this excursion are invariant under space-time reversal, which has several other consequ…
Cylindrical probability measures are finitely additive measures on Banach spaces that have sigma-additive projections to Euclidean spaces of all dimensions. They are naturally associated to notions of weak (cylindrical) random variable and hence weak (cylindrical) stochastic processes. In this paper we focus on cylindrical Levy processes. These have (weak) Levy-Ito decompositions and an associated Levy-Khintchine formula. If the process is weakly square integrable, its covariance operator can be used to construct a reproducing kernel Hilbert space in which the process has a decomposition as an…
Let {X_{t_1,t_2}: t_1,t_2 >= 0} be a two-parameter Lévy process on R^d. We study basic properties of the one-parameter process {X_{x(t),y(t)}: t \in T} where x and y are, respectively, nondecreasing and nonincreasing nonnegative continuous functions on the interval T. We focus on and characterize the case where the process has stationary increments.
We provide a Lévy-Itô decomposition of sample paths of Lévy processes with values in complete locally convex Suslin spaces. This class of state spaces contains the well investigated examples of separable Banach spaces, as well as Fréchet or distribution spaces among many others. Sufficient conditions for the existence of a pathwise compensated Poisson integral handling infinite activity of the Lévy process are given.
We describe the rate of growth of the derivative $C'$ of the convex minorant of a Lévy path at times where $C'$ increases continuously. Since the convex minorant is piecewise linear, $C'$ may exhibit such behaviour either at the vertex time $τ_s$ of finite slope $s=C'_{τ_s}$ or at time $0$ where the slope is $-\infty$. While the convex hull depends on the entire path, we show that the local fluctuations of the derivative $C'$ depend only on the fine structure of the small jumps of the Lévy process and are the same for all time horizons. In the domain of attraction of a stable process, we estab…
We characterise, in terms of their transition laws, the class of one-dimensional Lévy processes whose graph has a continuously differentiable (planar) convex hull. We show that this phenomenon is exhibited by a broad class of infinite variation Lévy processes and depends subtly on the behaviour of the Lévy measure at zero. We introduce a class of strongly eroded Lévy processes, whose Dini derivatives vanish at every local minimum of the trajectory for all perturbations with a linear drift, and prove that these are precisely the processes with smooth convex hulls. We study how the smoothness of…
We study sample-path large deviations for Lévy processes and random walks with heavy-tailed jump-size distributions that are of Weibull type. Our main results include an extended form of an LDP (large deviations principle) in the $J_1$ topology, and a full LDP in the $M_1'$ topology. The rate function can be represented as the solution to a quasi-variational problem. The sharpness and applicability of these results are illustrated by a counterexample proving the nonexistence of a full LDP in the $J_1$ topology, and by an application to a first passage problem.
We introduce a pathwise integration for Volterra processes driven by Lévy noise or martingale noise. These processes are widely used in applications to turbulence, signal processes, biology, and in environmental finance. Indeed they constitute a very flexible class of models, which include fractional Brownian and Lévy motions and it is part of the so-called ambit fields. A pathwise integration with respect of such Volterra processes aims at producing a framework where modelling is easily understandable from an information perspective. The techniques used are based on fractional calculus and in…
We define two new classes of stochastic processes, called tempered fractional Lévy process of the first and second kinds (TFLP and TFLP $I\!I$, respectively). TFLP and TFLP $I\!I$ make up very broad finite-variance, generally non-Gaussian families of transient anomalous diffusion models that are constructed by exponentially tempering the power law kernel in the moving average representation of a fractional Lévy process. Accordingly, the increment processes of TFLP and TFLP $I\!I$ display semi-long range dependence. We establish the sample path properties of TFLP and TFLP $I\!I$. We further use…
In this paper we show that a path-wise solution to the following integral equation $$ Y_t = \int_0^t f(Y_t) dX_t \qquad Y_0=a \in \R^d $$ exists under the assumption that X_t is a Lévy process of finite p-variation for some $p \geq1$ and that f is an $α$-Lipschitz function for some alpha>p. There are two types of solution, determined by the solution's behaviour at jump times of the process X, one we call geometric the other forward. The geometric solution is obtained by adding fictitious time and solving an associated integral equation. The forward solution is derived from the geometric soluti…
We explicitly construct and study an isometry between the spaces of square integrable functionals of an arbitrary Levy process and a vector-valued Gaussian white noise. In particular, we obtain explicit formulas for this isometry at the level of multiplicative functionals and at the level of orthogonal decompositions, as well as find its kernel. We consider in detail the central special case: the isometry between the $L^2$ spaces over a Poisson process and the corresponding white noise. The key role in our considerations is played by the notion of measure and Hilbert factorizations and related…
The characteristic measure of excursions away from a regular point is studied for a class of symmetric Lévy processes without Gaussian part. It is proved that the harmonic transform of the killed process enjoys Feller property. The result is applied to prove extremeness of the excursion measure and to prove several sample path behaviors of the excursion and the $ h $-path processes.
We determine the rate of decrease of the right tail distribution of the exponential functional of a Levy process with a convolution equivalent Levy measure. Our main result establishes that it decreases as the right tail of the image under the exponential function of the Levy measure of the underlying Levy process. The method of proof relies on fluctuation theory of Levy processes and an explicit path-wise representation of the exponential functional as the exponential functional of a bivariate subordinator. Our techniques allow us to establish rather general estimates of the measure of the ex…
We give meaning to differential equations with a rough path term and a Brownian noise term as driving signals. Such differential equations as well as the question of regularity of the solution map arise naturally and we discuss two applications: one revisits Clark's robustness problem in nonlinear filtering, the other is a Feynman--Kac type representation of linear RPDEs. En passant, we give a short and direct argument that implies integrability estimates for rough differential equations with Gaussian driving signals which is of independent interest.
Let $Φ$ be a nuclear space and let $Φ'_β$ denote its strong dual. In this work we establish the one-to-one correspondence between infinitely divisible measures on $Φ'_β$ and Lévy processes taking values in $Φ'_β$. Moreover, we prove the Lévy-Itô decomposition, the Lévy-Khintchine formula and the existence of càdlàg versions for $Φ'_β$-valued Lévy processes. A characterization for Lévy measures on $Φ'_β$ is also established. Finally, we prove the Lévy-Khintchine formula for infinitely divisible measures on $Φ'_β$.
For a real càdlàg function $f$ defined on a compact interval, its truncated variation at the level $c>0$ is the infimum of total variations of functions uniformly approximating $f$ with accuracy $c/2$ and (in opposite to the total variation) is always finite. In this paper, we discuss exponential integrability and concentration properties of the truncated variation of fractional Brownian motions, diffusions and Lévy processes. We develop a special technique based on chaining approach and using it we prove Gaussian concentration of the truncated variation for certain class of diffusions. Furthe…
We study the diameter of L{é}vy trees that are random compact metric spaces obtained as the scaling limits of Galton-Watson trees. L{é}vy trees have been introduced by Le Gall and Le Jan (1998) and they generalise Aldous' Continuum Random Tree (1991) that corresponds to the Brownian case. We first characterize the law of the diameter of L{é}vy trees and we prove that it is realized by a unique pair of points. We prove that the law of L{é}vy trees conditioned to have a fixed diameter r $\in$ (0, $\infty$) is obtained by glueing at their respective roots two independent size-biased L{é}vy trees …
We construct the law of Lévy processes conditioned to stay positive under general hypotheses. We obtain a Williams type path decomposition at the minimum of these processes. This result is then applied to prove the weak convergence of the law of Lévy processes conditioned to stay positive as their initial state tends to 0. We describe an absolute continuity relationship between the limit law and the measure of the excursions away from 0 of the underlying Lévy process reflected at its minimum. Then, when the Lévy process creeps upwards, we study the lower tail at 0 of the law of the height this…
Recent studies have demonstrated an interesting connection between the asymptotic behavior at ruin of a Lévy insurance risk process under the Cramér-Lundberg and convolution equivalent conditions. For example, the limiting distributions of the overshoot and the undershoot are strikingly similar in these two settings. This is somewhat surprising since the global sample path behavior of the process under these two conditions is quite different. Using tools from excursion theory and fluctuation theory, we provide a means of transferring results from one setting to the other which, among other thi…
Path decomposition is performed to characterize the law of the pre/post-supremum, post-infimum and the intermediate processes of a spectrally negative Levy process taken up to an independent exponential time T: As a result, mainly the distributions of the supremum of the post-infimum process and the maximum drawdown of the pre/postsupremum, post-infimum processes and the intermediate processes are obtained together with the law of drawdown durations.
Using the Wiener-Hopf factorization, it is shown that it is possible to bound the path of an arbitrary Levy process above and below by the paths of two random walks. These walks have the same step distribution, but different random starting points. In principle, this allows one to deduce Levy process versions of many known results about the large-time behavior of random walks. This is illustrated by establishing a comprehensive theorem about Levy processes which converge to \infty in probability.
We extend the result of Nualart and Schoutens on chaotic decomposition of the $L^2$-space of a Lévy process to the case of a generalized stochastic processes with independent values.
In this paper, we consider a Lévy-driven fluid queueing system where the server may subject to breakdowns and repairs. In addition, the server will leave for a vacation each time when he finds an empty system. We cast the queueing process as a Lévy process modified to have random jumps at two classes of stopping times. By using the Kella-Whitt martingale method, we obtain the limiting distribution of the virtual waiting time process. Moreover, we investigate the busy period, the correlation structure and the stochastic decomposition properties. These results may be generalized to Lévy processe…
In this paper we study the properties of the Poisson random measure and the Poisson integral associated with a G-Levy process. We prove that a Poisson integral is a G-Levy process and give the conditions which ensure that a Poisson integral belongs to a good space of random variables. In particular, we study the relation between the quasi- continuity of an integrand and the quasi-continuity of the integral. Lastly, we apply the results to establish the pathwise decomposition of a G-Levy process into a generalized G-Brownian motion and a pure-jump G-Levy process and prove that both processes be…
We prove that the stochastic differential equation $$ Y_{s,t}(x) = Y_{s,s}(x) + \int_0^{t-s} f(Y_{s,s+u}(x)) dX_{s+u}, Y_{s,s}(x)=x\in\R^d. $$ driven by a Lévy process whose paths have finite p-variation almost surely for some $p\in[1,2)$ defines a flow of locally C^1-diffeomorphisms provided the vector field f is $α$-Lipschitz for some $α>p$. Using a path- wise approach we relax the smoothness condition normally required for a class of discontinuous semi-martingales.
We completely describe the size and large intersection properties of the Holder singularity sets of Levy processes. We also study the set of times at which a given function cannot be a modulus of continuity of a Levy process. The Holder singularity sets of the sample paths of certain random wavelet series are investigated as well.
A scaling on some space is a measurable action of the group of positive real numbers. A measure on a measurable space equipped with a scaling is said to be $α$-homogeneous for some nonzero real number $α$ if the mass of any measurable set scaled by any factor $t > 0$ is the multiple $t^{-α}$ of the set's original mass. It is shown rather generally that given an $α$-homogeneous measure on a measurable space there is a measurable bijection between the space and the Cartesian product of a subset of the space and the positive real numbers (that is, a "system of polar coordinates") such that the pu…
A cylindrical Levy process does not enjoy a cylindrical version of the semi-martingale decomposition which results in the need to develop a completely novel approach to stochastic integration. In this work, we introduce a stochastic integral for random integrands with respect to cylindrical Levy processes in Hilbert spaces. The space of admissible integrands consists of adapted stochastic processes with values in the space of Hilbert-Schmidt operators. Neither the integrands nor the integrator is required to satisfy any moment or boundedness condition. The integral process is characterised as …
