Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2016 / iii / Paper 201 / 6 / b / Solution

Both Poisson processes start at zero and have càdlàg paths. On disjoint time intervals their increments are independent, and independence of the two processes makes the difference increments independent as well. Their increment laws depend only on interval length, so $X$ has stationary increments. For a time interval of length $h$, the probability that either Poisson process has a jump is $1-e^{-h}\to 0$. This proves stochastic continuity. Consequently the difference is a Lévy process, equivalently a continuous-time symmetric simple random walk with total jump rate one and jumps $+1$ and $-1$ each chosen with probability $1/2$.

The characteristic function of a Poisson variable of mean $\lambda$ is $\exp \{\lambda (e^{i\theta }-1)\}$. Independence therefore givesThus, in the negative-exponent convention of part (a),In the positive-exponent convention the answer is $\tilde{\psi }(\theta )=\cos \theta -1$. The Compound Poisson process has mean zero and variance $t$, consistent with the expansion $\psi (\theta )={\theta }^2/2+O({\theta }^4)$.