For a centered square-integrable martingale with and , apply the Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale to for . Conditional Jensen inequality gives the submartingale property, and crossing forces its square above . The bound is minimized by . This extends the Cantelli inequality from one random variable to a martingale maximum, without requiring independent increments.
One-sided maximal inequality for independent centered sums Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
For independent centered random variables and ,
Apply the Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale to and optimize at .
For the continuous adapted process , the supremum on each compact time interval is attained. Let . Continuity gives , and hence
Each event inside the union is in , so this proves carefully that is a stopping time. Merely checking rational times for would miss a path that touches the level at an isolated irrational time; the approximation from below avoids this issue. This is the closed-level hitting times of continuous adapted processes criterion. For , nonnegativity makes and the later inequality is immediate.
For , put and . On , continuity implies . To justify the optional sampling step without extra filtration assumptions, round upwards to a finite dyadic grid in , obtaining stopping times . The event belongs to , and hence to : directly, for , while for it is . Discrete optional sampling for the sampled submartingale gives
As , continuity gives . Nonnegativity and the Fatou lemma therefore yield
Consequently the Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale takes the precise form
For the second-moment bound, suppose first that ; otherwise the inequality with an infinite right side is automatic. Set . The layer cake representation and the preceding tail estimate give
The integrands are nonnegative, so the interchange is justified by the Tonelli theorem. Since is bounded, division is legitimate when its norm is nonzero, giving ; the zero-norm case is immediate. Finally, monotone convergence as gives
This truncated layer-cake proof of the L2 maximal inequality proves square integrability of the maximum rather than assuming it during the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality step.
The Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale states that, for a nonnegative submartingale and ,
For completeness, partition the crossing event according to its first crossing time . On that event , while . Summing the corresponding expectations over proves .
If , the exponential , with , is increasing as a function of . Apply the inequality to the martingale from part (a), with :
Letting and using continuity of probability measures on increasing events gives
The same event is obtained if the supremum excludes time zero, since . If , the right side is at least one and the bound is automatic; the nontrivial Doob maximal inequality argument is for .
Put . For , conditional Jensen inequality applied to the convex function shows that
is a nonnegative submartingale. Its integrability follows from the square integrability of . If , then , since . The Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale yields
where zero mean removes the cross term. For completeness, the maximal inequality follows by stopping at the first crossing: on the event of a crossing at , the submartingale property gives . Sum over , and use nonnegativity on the event of no crossing.
The derivative of the last ratio is
For , the minimum over is attained at . Substitution gives the one-sided maximal inequality for a centered square-integrable martingale:
If , almost surely and almost surely for every , so the bound also holds. The optimization is the same one underlying the Cantelli inequality, but the submartingale argument controls the entire finite-time maximum.
Put . If , then
The Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale therefore gives
The right side is minimized at , and substitution gives
For , the Exponential martingale for Brownian motion and the Doob maximal inequality for a nonnegative submartingale give
Taking gives . Apply the same argument to and use the union bound: