Stable limits for Markov chains via the Principle of Conditioning

TL;DR

This paper establishes stable limit theorems for sums of functions of Markov chains with heavy tails, under broad conditions involving spectral properties and a new conditioning principle, extending previous results significantly.

Contribution

It introduces a new version of the Principle of Conditioning using characteristic functions and extends limit theorems to broader classes of Markov chains with heavy-tailed summands.

Findings

Limit theorems hold under operator uniform integrability and spectral gap.

Hyperboundedness relaxes spectral gap to geometric mixing.

Example of Markov chain with spectral gap but not hyperbounded.

Abstract

We study limit theorems for partial sums of instantaneous functions of a homogeneous Markov chain on a general state space. The summands are heavy-tailed and the limits are stable distributions. The conditions imposed on the transition operator $P$ of the Markov chain ensure that the limit is the same as if the summands were independent. Such a~scheme admits a physical interpretation, as given in Jara et al. (Ann. Appl. Probab., 19 (2009), 2270--2300). We considerably extend the results of Jara et al., (ibid.) and Cattiaux and Manou-Abi (ESAIM Probab. Stat., 18 (2014), 468--486). We show that the theory holds under the assumption of operator uniform integrability in $L^2$ of $P$ (a notion introduced by Wu (J. Funct. Anal., 172 (2000), 301--376)) plus the $L^2$-spectral gap property. If we strengthen the uniform integrability in $L^2$ to the hyperboundedness, then the $L^2$-spectral gap property can be relaxed to the strong mixing at geometric rate (in practice: to geometric ergodicity). We provide an example of a Markov chain on a countable space that is uniformly integrable in $L^2$ (and admits an $L^2$-spectral gap), while it is not hyperbounded. Moreover, we show by example that hyperboundedness is still a weaker property than $\phi$-mixing, what enlarges the range of models of interest. What makes our assumptions working is a new, efficient version of the Principle of Conditioning that operates with conditional characteristic functions rather than predictable characteristics.