Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 30 3 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Define the stochastic integralIt is adapted to , starts at zero and has continuous paths. Integrals over disjoint clock intervals are centered Gaussian and independent, and an increment from to is independent of . The Itô isometry gives its varianceThese are precisely the defining properties of a -Brownian motion; in particular its future increments are independent of .
Deterministic substitution in the stochastic integral, first for step integrands and then by the Itô isometry, gives . HenceThe initial term is essential: a stochastic integral from time zero alone cannot equal , since . This is the unscaled part of the exponential Brownian time change to a stationary Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 30 3 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use the Itô product rule with the deterministic factor . Its quadratic covariation with is zero, givingMultiplication by the integrating factor solves the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck stochastic differential equation:The initial value is standard normal and independent of the future driving Brownian motion. Thus is a centered Gaussian process with variance one. For , its independent future noise gives . Its Gaussian finite-dimensional distributions consequently depend only on time differences, so it is a stationary process. This verifies the exponential Brownian time change to a stationary Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process directly.