Quasi-stationary distributions for time-changed symmetric -stable processes killed upon hitting zero
Abstract
For a time-changed symmetric -stable process killed upon hitting zero, under the condition of entrance from infinity, we prove the existence and uniqueness of quasi-stationary distribution (QSD). The exponential convergence to the QSD from any initial distribution is proved under conditions on transition densities.
Keywords and phrases: Quasi-stationary distribution; stable process; time-change; entrance at infinity; ground state.
Mathematics Subject classification(2020): 60G52 60F99
1 Introduction and main results
Quasi-stationary distribution (QSD in short) is a good measurement to describe the long-time behavior of the absorbing Markov process when the process is conditioned to survive. Many efforts were made to study the existence, uniqueness, the domains of attraction of QSDs and the convergence rate to a QSD for various Markov processes, cf. [6, 10, 11] for Markov chains, [3, 6, 15] for diffusion processes, and [12, 13, 16, 22] for general Markov processes under some additional conditions.
In this paper, we will study QSDs for time-changed symmetric stable processes killed upon hitting zero. Let be a symmetric -stable process on with generator , , where is the fractional Laplacian. Consider the following stochastic differential equation:
(1.1) |
where is a strictly positive continuous function on . By [7, Proposition 2.1], there is a unique weak solution to the SDE (1.1), and can also be expressed as a time-changed process where
By [18, Remark 43.12], the process is pointwise recurrent. Suppose is a probability measure.
Let , , and , for any Borel subset . According to [14, Theorem 2.3] and the strong Markov property, a direct calculation (see Appendix for more details) leads to the conclusion that for any , , which means the processes are almost-surely absorbed by . Let be the (sub-)process of killed upon 0, with transition function
We call a probability measure is a QSD for if for any and any ,
where .
Döring and Kyprianou [7] studied the entrance and exit from infinity for this process and Wang [25] studied the exponential and strong ergodicity. The main purpose of this paper is to study the QSD for time-changed -stable processes killed upon zero. We will consider the existence and uniqueness of QSD, Yaglom limit, domain of attraction and the speed of convergence to the QSD.
In this paper, we will assume the following condition always holds:
(1.2) |
By [25, Theorem 1.4], (1.2) is equivalent to strong ergodicity for ; meanwhile, according to [7, Table 2], (1.2) holds if and only if are entrance from infinity.
Denote by the space of square integrable measurable functions on with respect to . We first present the result on compactness for killed transition semigroup under the above condition.
Theorem 1.1.
If , then is compact on .
Under entrance from infinity (1.2), by Theorem 1.1, there exists a complete orthonormal set of eigenfunctions with , such that for any and , where are eigenvalues of generator of , such that , where the positivity and simplicity of will be proved in Appendix, Proposition A.2. The principal eigenfunction is called the ground state.
By using the ground state , we can state our results on QSDs.
Theorem 1.2.
If , then has a unique QSD:
(1.3) |
Furthermore, is a Yaglom limit of , that is for any and any subset ,
Moreover, there exists , such that
(1.4) |
where denotes the total variation of a signed measure .
Next, under some additional assumptions of transition density functions, we can prove attracts all probability measures on , and the exponential convergence in total variation.
Theorem 1.3.
Assume . Let
If for any , satisfies that , then attracts all probability measures on , that is, for any subset ,
(1.5) |
Furthermore, if , then for any probability measure on ,
(1.6) |
where is a constant independent of .
Remark 1.4.
The Lyapunov function condition is also an important method for proving the existence and uniqueness of QSD, and we refer the reader to [12, Theorem 2.2] for the recent result. Note that the Lyapunov function condition [12, C3] implies
which is equivalent to entrance from infinity by Lemma 3.2 in this paper.
Note that when is a polynomial, the conditions in above theorem can be explicitly characterized, and we obtain the following conclusion.
Example 1.5.
An outline of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, we recall some basic notions and properties about killed processes and Green functions. In section 3, we prove the compactness of the semigroup of killed processes (Theorem 1.1), and the strict positivity, continuity and boundedness of ground state, which plays an important role in subsequent proofs. In section 4, we prove our main results on QSDs (Theorem 1.2, Theorem 1.3 and Example 1.5), and give some corollaries.
2 Killed processes and Green functions
Recall that is a one-dimensional symmetric -stable process with , and is its time-changed process. According to [9, Theorem 6.2.1], it is known that is -symmetric. From [5, Section 1], the Dirichlet form associated with is given by
and
where .
Given an open subset , let be the killed (sub-)process of killed upon exiting with transition function
Define
where q.e. stands for quasi-everywhere, and is a quasi-continuous modification of (cf. [17, Section 2.2]). By [17, Theorem 3.5.7], is a regular Dirichlet form on associated with ; is symmetric with respect to the measure (where be the space of square integrable measurable functions on with respect to ). We write for the infinitesimal generator of in , with
and
Let
be the Green potential measure and denote the Green operator by
Simultaneously, the killed process and its Green potential measure are defined similarly. Let be the Green function of , that is, for any , . According to [25, Section 2], it should be pointed out here that the Green operator of has a strong relationship with the Green operator of :
(2.1) |
On some occasions, the Green function of can be expressed explicitly, for example:
- (1)
- (2)
Furthermore, according to [8, Lemma 3.3],
(2.5) |
where is a constant and defined by
Besides, thanks to the self-similarity of , for any ,
(2.6) |
3 Compactness of killed semigroups and properties of the ground states
Let be the semigroup of killed upon hitting 0. Denote by , and the killed process, the generator of , and the Green operator on respectively. In this section, we first prove that under the condition , is compact; therefore, we can study the properties of ground state, which is crucial to our proofs of main results on QSDs.
Firstly, we prove Theorem 1.1 and is a Hilbert-Schmidt operator on under the condition .
Proof of Theorem 1.1.
By [23, Theorem 0.3.9], to demonstrate is compact, we just need to prove is belong to resolvent set of and is compact.
Firstly, we prove , that is, the inverse of , is bounded in the operator norm from to :
Note that by (2.3),
Therefore, , and
From the Riesz-Thorin theorem, it follows that . By the definition of resolvent, .
Next, we show that is a Hilbert-Schmidt operator, which implies that is compact.
Note that
(3.1) |
therefore , and hence is a Hilbert-Schmidt operator.
∎
Theorem 1.1 indicates that there exists a complete orthonormal set of eigenfunctions with , such that for any and , where are eigenvalues of generator of , satisfying , where the positivity and simplicity of will be proved in Appendix, Proposition A.2. The principal eigenfunction is called the ground state. Next, we are going to prove some basic properties about . We prove the positivity and continuity of on in the following theorem.
Theorem 3.1.
If , then can be chosen to be strictly positive and continuous on .
Proof.
Firstly, we prove can be chosen to be nonnegative.
Actually, by using the proof by contradiction, we have or . Assume that and . Then , where is the Lebesgue measure. Note that on ,
while on ,
Therefore,
(3.2) |
However, by the definition of ground state and the first Dirichlet eigenvalue,
which contradicts (3.2). Thus or . If , then satisfies and . So we can always choose eigenfunction satisfying
(3.3) |
Note that by the definition of ground state, it is easy to see that
Thus by combining the above equality, (2.1), and (3.3), we get that for any ,
(3.4) |
which proves is nonnegative.
Next, we prove is strictly positive.
Actually,
(3.5) |
According to (2.2), by noting that , we just need to prove that for any , , . Indeed, is strictly decreasing in and strictly increasing in . Since for any , by [25, Page 592],
and , then for any .
Next, to prove the boundedness of , we need some lemmas.
Lemma 3.2.
if and only if
Proof.
Remark 3.3.
Lemma 3.4.
If , then for any , there exists a constant , such that
Proof.
It follows from Lemma 3.2 that, for any , there exists , such that
Using Markov’s inequality, we have
By Markov property, for any ,
Then by induction,
By Fubini Theorem, it comes to the fact that for any , we can take and such that for any ,
∎
Using Lemma 3.4 and following the proof of [20, Lemma 5.3 and Theorem 5.4], we obtain the following corollary.
Corollary 3.5.
If , then is bounded.
4 Proof of the main results on QSD
We verify the main results on QSD in this section. Firstly, we prove Theorem 1.2, which shows the existence and uniqueness of the QSD for , the existence of Yaglom limit and the exponential convergence to Yaglom limit when starting at a single point . Secondly, we provide a sufficient condition for exponential convergence to the QSD for any initial distribution (Theorem 1.3). Finally, we focus on Example 1.5 , which indicates the condition is a sufficient and necessary condition for uniform exponential convergence on some occasions.
First of all, we prove Theorem 1.2.
Proof of Theorem 1.2.
(1) Firstly, we prove
is a QSD for .
Since and is a finite measure, . According to [9, Lemma 4.1.3] and the -symmetry of , we know that is -symmetric. By using Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 3.1, we get that for all ,
It comes to the conclusion that is a QSD for .
(2) Secondly, we turn to prove the uniqueness of the QSD. Assume is also a QSD for , and there exists such that .
From the proof of [24, Proposition 3.5], for any and , has a density function with respect to . Using [4, (3)], we have for any and , has a density function with respect to satisfying
From [6, Theorem 2.2], there exists , such that for any ,
It follows that
Then is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure. Let .
By using Doob- transform, we define with the transition semigroup as follows:
By definition of symmetry and conservativity, we know that is -symmetric and conservative. Then we prove is irreducible. Indeed, let be a -invariant measurable set satisfying , according to [9, Lemma 1.6.1], -a.e. on for any . Therefore, -a.e. on for any , which yields that -a.e. on . Since for any and , for any . So , which means is irreducible. Note that for any compact subsets and any ,
(4.1) |
Note that by the continuity and positivity of ,
Combining this with the irreducibility and conservativity of , [21, Theorem 2.2] is valid, so
and
Therefore, by dominated convergence theorem, let in (4.1), we get that
Then for any , by taking and , we arrive at
It follows that for any , , which is a contradiction. Thus is the unique QSD.
(3) Thirdly, we turn to the proof of the existence of Yaglom limit of . Using Theorem 1.1 and following the proof of [16, Corollary 24], we have for any and any ,
By using Hölder inequality, we obtain
(4.2) |
which yields that
(4.3) |
and
(4.4) |
Therefore,
Hence is the Yaglom limit of .
Next, we consider the problem about the domain of attraction of QSD and the speed of convergence. We prove Theorem 1.3 as follows. The idea of the proof benefits from [26, Theorem 4.3] and [22, Proof of Corollary 2.2.4].
Proof of Theorem 1.3.
Firstly, we prove the result about the domain of attraction. We assume that and for any , .
By taking in Lemma 3.4, there exists such that
Combining Corollary 3.5 and (4), we have
Then for any , using strong Markov property, we get that
Then by the above analysis,
Therefore, by using dominated convergence theorem and 4.3, we have
where we use (4.3) in the last equality. Similarly,
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that
Secondly, we prove the result about the speed of convergence.
Assume that and . Let and . Then and .
According to (4), if , then there exists a constant such that for any ,
(4.7) |
Since , then for any probability measure on , we have
(4.8) |
Let . is a signed measure and its Hahn decomposition is denoted by . By calculation, it is easy to prove that and , so
Using (4), it follows that
Besides, from (4.7), we obtain that
Combining with (4), it comes to the conclusion by taking . ∎
In the following, we point out is necessary for the QSD attracting all probability measures on .
Theorem 4.1.
If there exists a QSD such that for any probability measure on and any subset ,
then .
Proof.
According to [6, Theorem 2.2], there exists a constant , such that
(4.9) |
By using (4.9), and a similar argument to the proof of [3, Proposition 7.5], we show that for any and any probability measure on , . For any , by taking (where is the Dirac measure), we obtain that . Let .
We claim that is bounded. If not, there would exist sequences such that . However, if we take , then it is easy to verify that , which is a contradiction.
Next, we will obtain a corollary about the exponential moments of the hitting time , and prove the first Dirichlet eigenvalue equals to the uniform decay rate
.
Corollary 4.2.
If , and for any , , then
(1) we have
(4.10) |
(2)
Proof.
It should be mentioned here that for some classical cases, such as Example 1.5, the exponential convergence to QSD (1.6) is equivalent to the entrance from infinity. Now we prove Example 1.5 as follows.
Proof of Example 1.5.
According to [25, Corollary 6], holds if and only if . Therefore, when , by Theorem 1.2 , has unique QSD given by (1.3), is the Yaglom limit of and (1.4) holds.
Furthermore, by [24, (3.11)], when , for the transition density with respect to , by choosing , we have there exists a constant such that
Note that
thus we know that
Therefore, (1.6) holds in this case. Noting that the exponential convergence (1.6) implies that (1.5), so by Theorem 4.1, (1.6) means that . Thus the exponential convergence to QSD (1.6) is equivalent to the entrance from infinity in this example. ∎
Finally, let’s discuss the quasi-ergodic distribution for , which is a related topic.
Definition 4.3.
Let be a probability measure on . We say is a quasi-ergodic distribution(QED) for , if for any and any ,
Using (4.3), (4.4) and Corollary 3.5, it is easy to prove the following statement in the same way as [13, Theorem 3.1].
Corollary 4.4.
Assume , then for any bounded and measurable functions on , and ,
-
(1)
,
-
(2)
,
-
(3)
,
where
Appendix
Proposition A.1 If , then for all , .
Proof.
Proposition A.2 If , then . Furthermore, is simple.
Proof.
If , then according to [25, Theorem 1.4], the process is strongly ergodic, thus is exponentially ergodic. Therefore, by [25, Theorem 1.1],
So by [25, Theorem 1.3],
According to [19, Theorem 6.6] and spectral representation theorem, the spectral radius of is a simple eigenvalue and equals to , which implies is a simple eigenvalue.
∎
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12171038), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2020YFA0712901).
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