Haar projection 2026-10-06
The Haar projection at level is the orthogonal projection onto the functions constant on level- dyadic intervals. It replaces a function by its mean on each cell. It can be expressed using level- Haar scaling functions, or using the constant function and Haar wavelets at levels below .
In the Gaussian white noise model, estimate a Haar scaling function coefficient by . The resulting Haar projection estimator is an unbiased estimator with independent coefficient errors of variance . On each cell it is the observed path increment divided by the cell length. This gives a finite-dimensional estimator without imposing smoothness on the drift.
In the Gaussian white noise model, observe the entire path
where is standard Brownian motion and the deterministic drift belongs to L2 space on . Equivalently, . For every deterministic , the observed stochastic integral satisfies
The 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 , hence
Minimizing at proves
For the dyadic partition, let , , putting the endpoint into the final interval. The Haar scaling functions
form an orthonormal basis of the space of functions constant on each interval. The Haar wavelets can be written as
For , 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 projection
On 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. Therefore
Taking 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 form
The 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.