Lévy construction of Brownian motion
ID: levy-construction-of-brownian-motion
The Lévy construction builds Brownian motion on by successive independent midpoint displacements on dyadic intervals. Start with and , where has the standard normal distribution. On each dyadic interval , choose a fresh independent standard normal random variable and use the displayed midpoint rule. Conditional on the endpoints, this is the correct Brownian bridge midpoint law.
To verify the increment law, if with , the new increments are . They are Jointly Gaussian, each has variance , and their covariance is zero, hence they are independent. Induction gives all dyadic Brownian increments. The change between consecutive linear interpolants has uniform norm . The Gaussian tail bound and union bound bound the chance that this maximum exceeds by . The First Borel-Cantelli lemma and prove uniform convergence almost surely. The continuous limit has the required Brownian increments at arbitrary times by dyadic approximation.
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