Lebesgue–Stieltjes integration Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
The Lebesgue–Stieltjes integral integrates against the Lebesgue-Stieltjes measure generated by an increasing right-continuous function . An atom at contributes .
Use the standard convention that the finite-variation process has càdlàg paths and that the stochastic integral starts from zero. Write for its total-variation process. The necessary admissibility condition is almost surely for each finite ; it holds, for example, for locally bounded . Define the pathwise Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral
An atom at contributes , so this convention also fixes the treatment of jumps.
Fix . For a generator of the predictable sigma-algebra, with , the Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral is
It vanishes when and is -measurable otherwise. The total-variation process is adapted: for a càdlàg path its value at is the supremum over a countable collection of partitions of an interval using rational interior points and endpoint . Thus the positive and negative Lebesgue-Stieltjes measures have -measurable masses on the generator intervals.
The Monotone class theorem, applied separately to these positive random measures on , extends this measurability from the generators of the predictable sigma-algebra to all nonnegative predictable processes. Truncation and positive/negative decomposition then cover every admissible . Consequently is adapted.
The integrability condition is essential. Taken literally, an arbitrary previsible process cannot always be integrated against a finite-variation process: with and deterministic for , , the proposed value at every diverges. The usual càdlàg convention is also what identifies by .
Every Lebesgue measurable set differs from a Borel set by a Lebesgue-null set . The given function is a homeomorphism from onto the interval . Hence is Borel relative to and therefore Lebesgue measurable in . Moreover,
and is null by Lusin condition N. The Completeness of Lebesgue measure now shows that is measurable, so
is defined for every .
Because is injective, it maps pairwise disjoint sets to pairwise disjoint sets and commutes with arbitrary unions. The countable additivity of therefore gives
Thus is the image-length measure of a strictly increasing continuous function. If , the null-set hypothesis gives , so
The measure is sigma-finite, since
The Radon-Nikodym theorem consequently supplies a nonnegative locally integrable function such that
For , strict increase and continuity give
and hence
The analogous oriented identity holds for . By differentiation of an indefinite Lebesgue integral,
Yes, the differentiability conclusion still holds when is merely non-decreasing. In fact, the Lebesgue theorem on differentiability of monotone functions says that every monotone function is differentiable almost everywhere; neither continuity nor the null-set hypothesis is needed for that conclusion. Flat intervals mean that the preceding image-set argument no longer gives disjoint images, so its natural replacement is the Lebesgue-Stieltjes measure determined by