The almost sure supermartingale convergence theorem applies to the -bounded supermartingale . Hence almost surely, and the Fatou lemma gives . Take the version of obtained from the sequence, so it is measurable for . Set
The tower property of conditional expectation makes a martingale, and the uniform integrability of conditional expectations makes it uniformly integrable. Explicitly, with , , and , we have , so
First choose large, then large. This proves uniform integrability uniformly in .
The uniformly integrable martingale convergence theorem gives a limit both almost surely and in . For and , . Passing to the limit and then extending from the algebra to identifies almost surely. Finally,
Thus with uniformly integrable and a supermartingale tending almost surely to zero. The terminal decomposition of an L1-bounded supermartingale does not require or in . Indeed, for equal to the negative of the fair-coin doubling martingale, , , and is negative and has constant absolute mean one.
Take independent and identically distributed random variables with the Bernoulli distribution of parameter , and their natural filtration. Set
The event at is the whole sample space. Independence gives
so this is a nonnegative martingale; it is integrable with . The first zero among the is almost surely finite, since the probability of having only ones through time is . After that first zero, every is zero. Hence the almost sure limit is zero:
This fair-coin doubling martingale also exhibits failure of uniform integrability: convergence in L1 would force the expectations to converge to zero.
The martingale convergence theorem in its -bounded form says that a martingale with has an integrable limit and
The norm bound on the limit follows from Fatou lemma. Boundedness in by itself does not imply convergence in L1. The uniformly integrable martingale convergence theorem gives the stronger conclusion: if is uniformly integrable, then both almost surely and in L1 norm, and . Conversely, convergence in L1 implies uniform integrability.
For the distinction, the fair-coin doubling martingale has expectation one for every but converges almost surely to zero. Its L1 norm remains one, so its convergence is not in L1 norm. These two formulations specify exactly which hypothesis is needed in part (d).
Let be independent and identically distributed random variables with the fair Bernoulli distribution, and put
Relative to , this fair-coin doubling martingale satisfies : while alive it doubles with probability and becomes zero otherwise. Its expected value is .
The probability of an infinite run of ones is , so is eventually zero almost surely. However,
Thus the martingale lacks convergence in L1 to its limit from almost sure convergence. Nor can it have convergence in L1 to any other limit: convergence in L1 implies convergence in probability, whose limit is unique up to almost sure equality.
An -bounded supermartingale has an almost sure convergence limit in . The conditional-expectation martingale has uniform integrability and converges to both almost surely and in . To identify its limit, test against every event in every finite-time sigma-algebra and use uniqueness on their generated sigma-algebra. Then is a supermartingale tending to zero almost surely. There is no general nonnegativity conclusion for , nor general convergence in L1 to zero: the negative of the fair-coin doubling martingale is a counterexample to both stronger assertions.