A Variational Approach to Constructing Diffusion Processes in Metric Spaces

  • Daniel Ng

Student thesis: Masters ThesisMPhil

Abstract

We use a minimisation schemeto define a discrete-time Markov chain with the martingale property on a Euclidean space R . As we send the step size of the chain to zero, we obtain an Ito diffusion by a theorem by Stroock and Varadhan. Since this variational approach only uses the metric property of Rd, we conjecture that this approach can be generalised to arbitrary metric spaces. We prove that the method works for diffusions on Rd and sketch the idea for diffusions on general metric spaces, and in particular for the case when the metric space is a Wasserstein space. The resulting measure-valued diffusion is known as a measure-valued martingale.
Date of Award1 Apr 2020
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Bath
SupervisorJohannes Zimmer (Supervisor) & Alex Cox (Supervisor)

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