Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 36 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
In the Gaussian white noise model, observe the entire pathwhere is standard Brownian motion and the deterministic drift belongs to L2 space on . Equivalently, . For every deterministic , the observed stochastic integral satisfiesThe noise is an isonormal Gaussian process. In particular its variance is . Gaussian white noise is interpreted through these integrals, rather than as an ordinary random function with a pointwise value at every time. No smoothness of is needed.
Here is the Gaussian maximum bound without independence. Put . It is integrable since it is bounded by . For every ,The second inequality uses only the moment-generating function of the standard normal distribution, so independence is unnecessary. Jensen inequality gives , henceMinimizing at proves
For the dyadic partition, let , , putting the endpoint into the final interval. The Haar scaling functionsform an orthonormal basis of the space of functions constant on each interval. The Haar wavelets can be written asFor , the constant function together with , , is another orthonormal basis of . Indeed, each successive level splits a cell's two constants into their sum and difference; the number of basis elements is . Thus the Haar projection is the orthogonal projectionOn cell its value is . The first formula also applies to .
Estimate each coefficient by its observed stochastic integral:This is the Haar projection estimator in Gaussian white noise. The noise integrals over disjoint intervals form a Gaussian vector with zero off-diagonal covariance. The principle that uncorrelated jointly Gaussian variables are independent then makes these coefficients independent. ThereforeTaking expectations shows that is an unbiased estimator of , both coefficientwise and pointwise for the stated step-function representatives.
Only one scaling function is nonzero in each cell, so the supremum norm of the error has the exact formThe endpoint convention ensures the same identity at . Apply the Gaussian maximum bound without independence with to obtain the supremum norm risk of a Haar projection estimator:The factor comes from cellwise scaling, while the extra square root of comes from taking the maximum over Gaussian errors.
The cellwise error of the Haar projection estimator in Gaussian white noise is times a standard normal variable. Its supremum norm is therefore exactly that factor times the Gaussian maximum over cells. The Gaussian maximum bound without independence gives expected error at most . This concerns the stochastic error about the projection; approximation bias must be added when estimating the full drift.