Independent increments of a Gaussian martingale Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-28
A centered continuous Gaussian process that is also a martingale has independent increments. Every future increment has zero covariance with every finite vector of past values by the martingale property; uncorrelated jointly normal variables are independent.
Let . Under the usual nondegenerate regression assumption , maximizing the normal likelihood is equivalent to minimizing the residual sum of squares. The normal equations and give the maximum-likelihood estimators
Write and . Then , , and the residual is . Independence of the errors gives
For each ,
Thus the three requested variables are pairwise uncorrelated.
They are linear functions of the jointly normal error vector. More strongly, the whole vector has a multivariate normal distribution, and its block covariances show that , and the residual vector are independent, by uncorrelated jointly normal variables are independent. Independence is preserved when applying a measurable function to the residual block. Hence
The residual projection is , of rank , so additionally . This is the orthogonal projection of a Gaussian vector interpretation of the same result. The printed design conditions alone allow ; then the fit is exact, the positive-variance likelihood has no finite maximizer, and the residual test in part (b) is undefined. The standard testing question therefore needs .
Let
They are jointly normal because they are linear combinations of a Gaussian vector. When ,
Hence uncorrelated jointly normal variables are independent. Their means and variances are
and
Therefore
independently.
Fix . Since is a martingale,
Every finite vector consisting of and past values has a multivariate normal distribution. Therefore uncorrelated jointly normal variables are independent, so the increment is independent of every finite vector of past values. A Monotone class theorem then extends this to independence from . This is the independent increments of a Gaussian martingale.