A Dirichlet process mixture model avoids fixing the number of occupied functions. Let be the finite-dimensional Gaussian process law on the common input grid and specify
A draw from a Dirichlet process is almost surely discrete, so several coincide and thereby form clusters. The number of occupied clusters is random and can grow with the data.
Put and retain , which equals one for the stated exponential covariance function. The covariance matrix of is
Conditioning a multivariate normal distribution and simplifying gives
The absence of from both conditional moments shows that and are conditionally independent given . Equivalently, the exponential-kernel Gaussian process is the stationary Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, which is Markov.
The variable is the limit of Riemann sums of the Gaussian process , so it is a Gaussian random variable. Its mean is zero, and Fubini's theorem with gives
Therefore .
Let , let be independent standard normal variables, and choose . Define
Finite collections of values are limits of centered Gaussian vectors, so this is a centered Gaussian process.
The functions are an orthonormal basis of . Hence
which proves . For every integer ,
Thus, almost surely and simultaneously for all , the differentiated series converges uniformly on . Termwise differentiation gives an almost surely infinitely differentiable version.
Finally, let be finite-dimensional. Choose a nonzero . Then
is a centered normal variable of variance
because every is positive and is complete. The event is contained in , which has probability zero because a nondegenerate normal distribution has no atoms. Therefore for every finite-dimensional linear subspace .
Fix . Part (b)(i) makes a probability measure on , equivalent to since . Its density process on is . The Girsanov theorem, applied to the stochastic exponential with integrand , says that
is standard Brownian motion under . The required local square-integrability follows from path continuity, and the true martingale property was proved in part (b)(i).
By part (b)(ii), under the process is therefore the zero-started Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process:
This identifies its full law on continuous path space, rather than just its one-time marginal. It is a centered Gaussian process, since it consists of deterministic Itô integrals against Brownian motion. For , the Itô isometry gives its covariance function:
In particular, its Ornstein-Uhlenbeck transition distribution at the terminal time is
Periodic covariance function Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
This covariance function is periodic with period . Map time to the circle and pull back a Gaussian kernel; since , this proves positive semidefiniteness. A Gaussian process with this kernel has and therefore repeats at every fixed phase. Replacing the inner by changes the actual period to .
A zero-mean Gaussian process need not have zero average in each realization. For the periodic covariance function, the constant Fourier component is
where is a modified Bessel function. Replacing by gives a Gaussian process with kernel . This is a positive-semidefinite kernel because it is a covariance after a linear transformation, and each sample has zero period average. The real integral representation of the modified Bessel function I0 yields the displayed constant.
Phase folding of a light curve maps timestamps onto a trial cycle of duration . Given a reference time , define the phase in cycles by
where is the fractional part, using the floor function also for negative . Plot brightness against rather than ; measurements separated by an integer multiple of occupy the same phase. For a periodic function , this reveals the shared shape of many cycles. Folding changes coordinates; it neither averages samples nor chooses the correct by itself. Welsh et al.'s folded Kepler plot separates the exoplanet transit and orbital brightness modulation. [ref].
The second figure uses a completely synthetic trapezoidal dip: days, day, and the same depth and four-hour duration as the first figure. Different colours identify four successive cycles. Correct folding superimposes the dips; a wrong trial orbital period spreads them out. If , the centre of the th repeated event shifts by approximately cycles when folded on , for . With days, the fourth plotted event is displaced by cycles. Transit-timing variations can also smear a constant-period fold, so retain the original timestamps and inspect individual events.
Figure 1.
Toy phase folding: repeated synthetic dips align at the correct period; a flux dip becomes a positive magnitude change
. Details.
One may combine nearby phases with a weighted mean, but the uncertainty reduction requires assumptions. For independent measurements with common standard deviation and effectively the same expected brightness within the bin, their arithmetic mean has standard deviation . Thus sixteen independent -precision samples give precision on that phase-bin mean. Shared calibration errors, changing starspots, and bins wide enough to mix ingress with out-of-transit brightness violate these assumptions. A folded plot can conceal changes between cycles. Gaussian process models can represent correlated variability and interpolate irregular samples, but their predictions and uncertainties depend on their assumed covariance function.
The bottom panels show the same model as relative brightness and as magnitude difference in one fixed photometric passband with a fixed magnitude zero point:
A dip to gives magnitudes: fainter means a larger apparent magnitude. The figure places larger magnitude differences lower on the page so the two dip shapes are easy to compare; reversing that plotting convention does not change the formula. For and small , expansion of the logarithm gives . The exact transform is nonlinear: transforming an exposure's mean brightness is generally different from averaging its instantaneous apparent magnitudes. The ordinary logarithm cannot be applied to a nonpositive background-subtracted measurement; keep such measurements and their uncertainties in brightness units for an appropriate statistical model.
Reproducing-kernel Hilbert space of a stationary Gaussian process Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
If a stationary Gaussian process has covariance spectral density , its reproducing-kernel Hilbert space has norm
on the functions for which this integral is finite.
Let a centered Gaussian process satisfy with , and suppose has a large deviation principle in the sublinear path space for fluid queues, with speed and good rate function . For , put and . Self-similarity gives . Time substitution and the contraction principle for large deviations therefore give an LDP for with speed and
The same family has rate function by contraction, and by replacing with and expressing the speed again as . Uniqueness of a rate function gives , hence for , with .
Stationary process Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-10-14
A stationary process, in the strict sense, has the same joint probability distribution after every common shift of its time indices. More precisely, for every positive integer , every choice of times , and every integer shift ,
Here equality means equality of probability distributions, not equality of realized observations. A sample path can fluctuate, stay positive for a while, or show accidental runs while its generating law remains stationary. Strong white noise is a basic example: shifting time preserves every joint law of its independent and identically distributed random variables.
The distinction between strict stationarity and weak stationarity is useful. The former preserves all finite joint laws; the latter preserves only the finite mean and covariance structure. Strict stationarity with finite second moments implies weak stationarity, but strict stationarity itself does not require finite variance. A Gaussian process with weak stationarity is also strictly stationary, because each of its finite-dimensional distributions, a joint normal distribution, is determined by its mean vector and covariance matrix.
Time reversal of a Brownian bridge Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-31
The Brownian bridge covariance kernel is invariant under reversing both times, and its mean is zero. The two centered Gaussian processes therefore have equal finite-dimensional laws. Equality on countably many rational coordinates transfers the event of continuity at zero to the reversed endpoint. Interior continuity then extends the rational-time limit to all times. This proves the terminal continuity of the stochastic integral representation of a Brownian bridge.