Fractal-Dimensional Properties of Subordinators
Adam Barker

TL;DR
This paper investigates the fractal properties of subordinators, establishing a central limit theorem for the box-counting covering number, and introduces a new process to better understand the subordinator's dimension in relation to its Lévy measure.
Contribution
It provides a CLT for the box-counting number of subordinators and introduces a new process simplifying the analysis of their fractal dimensions.
Findings
Established a CLT for the number of boxes needed to cover a subordinator's range.
Proposed a new process by truncating jumps, facilitating easier analysis of fractal properties.
Connected the box-counting dimension to the Lévy measure of the subordinator.
Abstract
This work looks at the box-counting dimension of sets related to subordinators (non-decreasing L\'evy processes). It was recently shown in [Savov, 2014] that almost surely , where is the minimal number of boxes of size at most needed to cover a subordinator's range up to time , and is the subordinator's renewal function. Our main result is a central limit theorem (CLT) for , complementing and refining work in [Savov, 2014]. Box-counting dimension is defined in terms of , but for subordinators we prove that it can also be defined using a new process obtained by shortening the original subordinator's jumps of size greater than . This new process can be manipulated with remarkable ease in comparison to , and allows better understanding of the box-counting…
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main\sethead[0][][0 \sectiontitle] \hdrtitle0 \sethead[0][ADAM BARKER][] FRACTAL-DIMENSIONAL PROPERTIES OF SUBORDINATORS0 \setfoot[][][]
FRACTAL-DIMENSIONAL PROPERTIES OF SUBORDINATORS
ADAM BARKER
Abstract
This work looks at the box-counting dimension of sets related to subordinators (non-decreasing Lévy processes). It was recently shown in [24] that almost surely , where is the minimal number of boxes of size at most needed to cover a subordinator’s range up to time , and is the subordinator’s renewal function. Our main result is a central limit theorem (CLT) for , complementing and refining work in [24].
Box-counting dimension is defined in terms of , but for subordinators we prove that it can also be defined using a new process obtained by shortening the original subordinator’s jumps of size greater than . This new process can be manipulated with remarkable ease in comparison to , and allows better understanding of the box-counting dimension of a subordinator’s range in terms of its Lévy measure, improving upon [24, Corollary 1]. Further, we shall prove corresponding CLT and almost sure convergence results for the new process.
Introduction & Background
We shall mostly study the minimal number, , of intervals of length at most needed to cover the range of a subordinator . The main result in this paper is a central limit theorem for , complementing the almost sure convergence result , almost surely, where denotes the renewal function of the subordinator, see [24, Theorem 1.1].
Prior to the results in [24], most works on box-counting dimension focused only on finding the value of , which defines the box-counting dimension. However, working with itself allows precise understanding of its fluctuations around its mean, inaccessible at the log scale.
We will introduce an alternative “box-counting scheme” to , which allows us to understand the dimension of the range in terms of the Lévy measure, complementing results formulated in terms of the renewal function.
The fractal dimensional study of sets such as the range or graph of Lévy processes, and especially subordinators, has a very rich history. There are many works which study the box-counting, Hausdorff, and packing dimensions of sets related to Lévy processes [4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26].
A Lévy process is a stochastic process in which has stationary, independent increments, and starts at the origin. A subordinator is a non-decreasing real-valued Lévy process. The Laplace exponent of a subordinator is defined by the relation for . By the Lévy Khintchine formula [1, p72], can always be expressed as
[TABLE]
where d is the linear drift, and is the Lévy measure, which determines the size and intensity of the jumps (discontinuities) of , and satisfies the condition . The renewal function is the expected first passage time above , , where .
If the Lévy measure is infinite, then infinitesimally small jumps occur at an infinite rate, almost surely. We will not study processes with finite Lévy measure, as they have only finitely many jumps, and hence no fractal structure.
The box-counting dimension of a set in is , where is the minimal number of -dimensional boxes of side length needed to cover the set. The limsup and liminf respectively define the upper and lower box-counting dimensions. For further background reading, we refer to [1, 2] for subordinators, [7, 21, 23] for Lévy processes, and[9, 26] for fractals.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the statements of all of the main results; Section 3 contains the proof of the CLT result for and the lemmas required for this proof; Section 4 contains the proofs of all of the main results on the new process ; Section 5 extends this work to the graph of a subordinator, and considers the special case of a subordinator with regularly varying Laplace exponent.
Main Results
A Central Limit Theorem for
Expanding upon Bertoin’s result [2, Theorem 5.1], the following almost sure limiting behaviour of was determined by Savov [24, Theorem 1.1].
Theorem 2.1** (Savov, 2014).**
If a subordinator has infinite Lévy measure or a non-zero drift, then for all , almost surely.
We will complement and refine this work with a CLT on . When the subordinator has no drift, we require a mild condition on the Lévy measure:
[TABLE]
where , and .
Remark 2.2**.**
Condition has many equivalent formulations, see [1, Ex. III.7] and [3, Section 2.1]. We emphasise that is far less restrictive than regular variation (or even -regular variation) of the Laplace exponent, and appears naturally in the context of the law of the iterated logarithm (see e.g. [1, p87]).
Theorem 2.3**.**
For every driftless subordinator with Lévy measure satisfying , for any , satisfies the following central limit theorem:
[TABLE]
as , where , and .
An Alternative Box-Counting Scheme,
Definition 2.4**.**
The process of -shortened jumps, , is obtained by shortening all jumps of of size larger than to instead have size . That is, is the subordinator with Laplace exponent and Lévy measure , where denotes a unit point mass at , and is the Lévy measure of .
Definition 2.5**.**
For , is defined by .
We will see in Theorem 2.7 that can replace in the definition of the box-counting dimension of the range of . Then we will prove almost sure convergence and CLT results for .
Remark 2.6**.**
The log scale at which box-counting dimension is defined allows flexibility among functions to be taken in place of the optimal count. In particular, there is freedom between functions related by asymptotically, where the notation means that there exist positive constants such that for all . For more details, we refer to [9, p42].
Theorem 2.7**.**
For all , for every subordinator, . In particular, by Remark 2.6, can be used to define the box-counting dimension of the range, i.e. .
Theorem 2.8**.**
For every subordinator with infinite Lévy measure, for all ,
[TABLE]
almost surely, where , and .
Remark 2.9**.**
It can be deduced from [2, Prop 1.4] that , for any subordinator. Theorems 2.1, 2.7 and 2.8 allow us to understand this relationship in terms of geometric properties of subordinators.
Theorem 2.10**.**
For every subordinator with infinite Lévy measure, for all ,
[TABLE]
as , where , and
Remark 2.11**.**
Applying Remark 2.4, the Lévy Khintchine formula , and the fact that for any integrable function , , it follows that for all , the mean and variance of are given by
[TABLE]
Computing the moments of is remarkably simple in comparison to the moments of , which are not well known. This is a key benefit of using to study the box-counting dimension of the range of a subordinator.
Proof of Theorem 2.3
A Sufficient Condition for Theorem 2.3
We will first work towards proving the following sufficient condition:
Lemma 3.1**.**
For every subordinator with infinite Lévy measure, a sufficient condition for the convergence in distribution , with , is
[TABLE]
The proof of Lemma 3.1 relies upon the Berry-Esseen Theorem, a very useful result for proving central limit theorem results as it provides the speed of convergence, which is stated here in Lemma 3.2. See [10, p542] for more details.
Lemma 3.2**.**
(Berry-Esseen Theorem) Let . There exists a finite constant such that for every collection of iid random variables with the same distribution as , where has finite mean, finite absolute third moment, and finite non-zero variance, for all and ,
[TABLE]
For brevity, we will only provide calculations for . The proofs for different values of are essentially the same. Recall the definitions , , and . We shall aim to prove that for all ,
[TABLE]
For each , provides an upper bound, and then under condition (2), we can prove that this bound converges to zero as .
Proof of Lemma 3.1.
Let denote the th time at which increases, and let , , denote iid copies of . By the strong Markov property, and have the same distribution. Then, with , where denotes the ceiling function,
[TABLE]
and since only takes integer values, using the fact that has the same distribution as the sum of iid copies of , it follows that
[TABLE]
It follows from Lemma 3.3 that , which then implies that as . Then, as , the asymptotic behaviour of is
[TABLE]
It follows, with depending on and , that as ,
[TABLE]
Now, by the triangle inequality and symmetry of the normal distribution, combining and , it follows that as , for any ,
[TABLE]
Recall that we wish to show that converges to zero. By the Berry-Esseen Theorem and the fact that , it follows that as ,
[TABLE]
Applying the triangle inequality, then Lemma 3.3 with and to , it follows that
[TABLE]
Therefore if the condition as in the statement of Lemma 3.1 holds, then the desired convergence in distribution follows, as required.
∎
Lemma 3.3**.**
For every subordinator with infinite Lévy measure, for all ,
[TABLE]
Proof of Lemma 3.3.
First, by the moments and tails lemma (see [15, p26]),
[TABLE]
By the definition of , it follows that if and only if , and then
[TABLE]
Now, applying Markov’s inequality, the definition , and the fact that for some constant (see [2, Prop 1.4]),
[TABLE]
which is finite and independent of . Therefore the is finite, as required. ∎
Proof of Theorem 2.3
Theorem 2.3 is proven by a contradiction, using Lemma 3.4 to show that the sufficient condition in Lemma 3.6 holds.
Lemma 3.4**.**
Recall the definition . The condition implies that for each , there exists a sufficiently large integer such that
[TABLE]
Proof of Lemma 3.4.
The integral condition imposes that for some ,
[TABLE]
Then, by effectively replacing with (so is replaced by a smaller constant), we can replace with , which can be made arbitrarily large by choice of . This follows by splitting up the fraction,
[TABLE]
where we simply take sufficiently large that .
∎
Using Lemma 3.4 for a contradiction is the step in the proof of Theorem 2.3 which requires the condition . In order to prove Theorem 2.3, we require the notation introduced in Definition 3.5. We refer to [14, p93] for more details.
Definition 3.5**.**
Recalling from Remark 2.4 that the process has Laplace exponent , we define:
(i) ,
(ii) ,
(iii) denotes the unique solution to , for .
One can ignore the drift d in Definition 3.5, since throughout Section 3. The proof of Theorem 2.3 now requires the following lemma:
Lemma 3.6**.**
For , , and , if
[TABLE]
then the desired convergence in distribution , as in Theorem 2.3, holds.
Proof of Theorem 2.3.
Assume for a contradiction that there exists a sequence converging to zero, such that . That is to say, assume that the sufficient condition in Lemma 3.6 doesn’t hold. For brevity, we omit the dependence of on . Hence for all fixed , for all small enough . By Fubini’s theorem, , so
[TABLE]
Removing part of the first integral and noting for all ,
[TABLE]
Now, for . So for , where is fixed and chosen sufficiently large that for all (this is possible by the relation , see [2, Prop 1.4]),
[TABLE]
where the last two inequalities respectively follow by Definition 2.4, Definition 3.5 with , and the relation , see [1, p74]. So for a constant , for all sufficiently small , we have shown .
Taking small enough that , it follows that , and hence . But in Lemma 3.4 we showed that for each fixed , there is sufficiently large such that , which is a contradiction, so the sufficient condition as in Lemma 3.6 must hold.
∎
Remark 3.7**.**
For a driftless subordinator, Theorem 2.3 holds under the same condition applied to the function rather than the integrated tail function . The integrated tail depends on the large jumps of since , but does not depend on the large jumps, so these conditions are substantially different.
With only minor changes, the argument as in the proof of Theorem 2.3 works with in place of . Under condition for in place of , one can prove that Lemma 3.4 holds with in place of . Then we assume for a contradiction that there exists a sequence converging to zero, such that . But then as in the proof of Theorem 2.3, one can deduce that , which contradicts the analogous Lemma 3.4 result with in place of . **
Remark 3.8**.**
Theorem 2.3 can also be proven for subordinators with a drift , under a stronger regularity condition. For , define as the Laplace exponent of . The convergence in distribution holds whenever . This is proven using Remark 3.10, the inequality for all Lévy processes (see [22, p954] for details), and the asymptotic expansion of as in [8, Theorem 4].**
Proofs of Lemmas 3.9, 3.12, 3.6
Lemmas 3.9, 3.12, and 3.6 give sufficient conditions for Theorem 2.3 to hold. The proofs for these lemmas are facilitated by Lemma 3.11, which was proven in 1987 by Jain and Pruitt [14, p94]. Recall that denotes the process with -shortened jumps, as defined in Definition 2.4.
Lemma 3.9**.**
The convergence in distribution as in Theorem 2.3 holds if for some , .
Proof of Lemma 3.9.
For all , recalling that ,
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
For the desired convergence in distribution to hold, it is sufficient by Lemma 3.1 to show that . Now,
[TABLE]
Note that if and only if since jumps of size larger than do not occur in either case, and so when . It follows that holds if
[TABLE]
∎
Remark 3.10**.**
The condition in Lemma 3.9 is not optimal. If for , then the convergence in distribution follows too. This stronger condition does not lead to any more generality than the condition for driftless subordinators.
Lemma 3.11** (Jain, Pruitt [14, Lemma 5.2]).**
There exists such that for every , and satisfying ,
[TABLE]
Lemma 3.12**.**
For , , and , if
[TABLE]
then the desired convergence in distribution , as in Theorem 2.3, holds.
Proof of Lemma 3.12.
Applying the inequality (16) from Lemma 3.11,
[TABLE]
Now, letting , we will consider two separate cases:
(i) If , then by choice of such that , the lower bound in (17) is larger than a positive constant as .
(ii) If , then imposing , the lower bound in (17) is again larger than a positive constant as . The desired convergence in distribution then follows in each case by Lemma 3.9.
∎
Proof of Lemma 3.6.
Noting that for all ,
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
Then by the relation for a constant (see [2, Prop 1.4]),
[TABLE]
So we can conclude that if , then the desired convergence in distribution follows by Lemma 3.12.
∎
Proofs of Results on
Firstly, we prove Theorem 2.7, which confirms that can replace in the definition of the box-counting dimension of the range. This is done by showing that , which is known to be sufficient by Remark 2.6.
Proof of Theorem 2.7.
The jumps of the original subordinator and the process with shortened jumps are all the same size, other than jumps bigger than size . The optimal number of intervals to cover the range, , always increases by at each jump bigger than size , regardless of its size, so it follows that , with the obvious notation.
Instead of counting the number of boxes needed to cover the range of , consider those needed for the range of the subordinator with Lévy measure (so all jumps of size larger than are removed), and adding , which counts the number of jumps larger than size of . It follows that .
Consider , the number of intervals in a lattice of side length to intersect with the range of . It is easy to show that (see [9, p42]). Also, , since has no jumps of size larger than . Now, for small enough , and hence
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
By Remark 2.6, , and hence can be used to define the box-counting dimension of the range of any subordinator.
∎
Next we will prove the CLT result for , working with for brevity. The proof is essentially the same for other values of . We will show convergence of the Laplace transform of to that of the standard normal distribution. Recall that has Laplace transform .
Proof of Theorem 2.10.
By Remark 2.4 and , is a subordinator with Laplace exponent , and it follows that for any ,
[TABLE]
Recalling the definition , where , and writing in the Lévy Khintchine representation as in , it follows that
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
Then applying the fact that for all ,
[TABLE]
By the definition of , it follows that , and so
[TABLE]
It is then sufficient, in order to show that converges to , to prove that
[TABLE]
Again by the definition of , for to hold we require both
[TABLE]
Squaring the expression in , since within each integral, it follows that
[TABLE]
By the binomial expansion, for , and then
[TABLE]
since the Lévy measure is infinite. For , simply observe that
[TABLE]
∎
Next we will prove the almost sure convergence result for . If there is a drift and the Lévy measure is finite, then the result is trivial. So we need only consider cases with infinite Lévy measure, and begin with the zero drift case. Using a Borel-Cantelli argument (see [15, p32] for details), we shall prove that almost surely.
First, we will prove the almost sure convergence to along a subsequence converging to zero. Then, by monotonicity of and , we will deduce that for all between and , also tends to as .
Proof of Theorem 2.8.
For all , by Chebyshev’s inequality and Remark 2.11,
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
Recall that , so since is non-decreasing as decreases, it follows that is non-decreasing as decreases. Now, , and is continuous, so it follows that for any fixed there is a decreasing sequence such that for each . Then is finite, so by the Borel-Cantelli lemma, almost surely.
When there is no drift, is given by changing the original subordinator’s jump sizes from to . By monotonicity of this map, it follows that for a fixed sample path of the original subordinator, each individual jump of the process is at least as big as the corresponding jump of the process . So is non-decreasing as decreases, and so for all ,
[TABLE]
Then by our choice of the subsequence , it follows that for all ,
[TABLE]
and since , it follows that
[TABLE]
Taking limits as , it follows that almost surely.
For a process with a positive drift and infinite Lévy measure, denote the scaling term obtained by removing the drift as . Then the above Borel-Cantelli argument for yields the almost sure limit along a subsequence as in . Then since the functions and are again monotone in when there is a drift, the argument applies as in .
∎
Remark 4.1**.**
Theorem 2.8 is formulated in terms of the characteristics of the subordinator (i.e. the drift and Lévy measure). For , the almost sure behaviour in Theorem 2.1 is formulated in terms of the renewal function, and in order to write this in terms of the characteristics, the expression is more complicated than for . For details, see [24, Corollary 1] and [8, Prop 1], the latter of which is very powerful for understanding the asymptotics of for subordinators with a positive drift, significantly improving upon results in [5]. **
Extensions and Special Cases
Extensions: Box-Counting Dimension of the Graph
The graph of a subordinator up to time is the set . The box-counting dimensions of the range and graph are closely related. This is evident when we consider the mesh box counting schemes , , denoting graph and range respectively. The mesh box-counting scheme counts the number of boxes in a lattice of side length to intersect with a set.
Remark 5.1**.**
For every subordinator with infinite Lévy measure or a positive drift, where denotes the floor function. Indeed, increases by 1 if and only if increases by 1 and the new box for the graph lies directly above the previous box. For each integer , also increases at time , the new box directly to the right of the previous box.
Remark 5.2**.**
It follows that the graph of every subordinator has the same box-counting dimension as the range of , the original process plus a unit drift.
Proposition 5.3**.**
For every subordinator with drift d , the box-counting dimensions of the range and graph agree almost surely.
Proof of Proposition 5.3.
Letting denote the first passage time of the subordinator above , consider an optimal covering of the graph with squares of side length as follows:
Starting with , at time , add a new box , and so on. Denote the number of these boxes by , and write as the optimal number of boxes needed to cover the range.
If d , then we have because . It follows that each time increases by , so does , and vice versa, so , and the box-counting dimension of the range and graph are equal when .
For d , a similar argument applies with a covering of rectangles rather than squares. Starting with , at time , add a new box , and so on. The number of these boxes is again , since . By Remark 2.6 , this covering of rectangles can still be used to define the box-counting dimension of the range, since for , with and as the number of squares and of rectangles respectively,
[TABLE]
∎
Remark 5.4**.**
The box-counting dimension of the graph of every subordinator is 1 almost surely, since subordinators have bounded variation (BV) almost surely. The same is true for the graph of all BV functions/processes, including in particular every Lévy process without a Gaussian component, whose Lévy measure satisfies . By Proposition 5.3, the box-counting dimension of the range of every subordinator with drift is 1 almost surely. **
Special Cases: Regular Variation of the Laplace Exponent
Corollary 5.5 is analogous to [24, Corollary 2], with in place of . This allows very fine comparisons, not visible at the log-scale, to be made between subordinators whose Laplace exponents are regularly varying with the same index.
Corollary 5.5**.**
Consider a subordinator whose Laplace exponent is regularly varying at infinity, such that for , where is a slowly varying function. Then almost surely as , for all ,
[TABLE]
Proof of Corollary 5.5.
Note that , i.e. there is no drift, when the Laplace exponent is regularly varying of index . By Theorem 2.8, as ,
[TABLE]
Since is regularly varying at [math], as , (see [1, p75]). Then by Karamata’s Theorem (see [3, Prop. 1.5.8]), almost surely as ,
[TABLE]
∎
Corollary 5.6 strengthens the result of Theorem 2.7 when the Laplace exponent is regularly varying. The result can not be strengthened in general, as the relationship between and is “” rather than “” (see[2, Prop. 1.4]).
Corollary 5.6**.**
For a subordinator with Laplace exponent regularly varying at infinity with index , for all , almost surely as ,
[TABLE]
Corollary 5.6 follows immediately from Corollary 5.5 and [24, Corollary 2], which says that when the Laplace exponent is regularly varying at infinity, such that for , where is a slowly varying function, for all , almost surely as ,
[TABLE]
Remark 5.7**.**
For , takes values between and . So and are closely related when the Laplace exponent is regularly varying, but as , grows to infinity slightly faster than .
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Mladen Savov for guiding the author towards this interesting topic, and for numerous helpful discussions related to this work. Further thanks to Ron Doney for his feedback on an early draft of this paper, and thanks to an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on this work.
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