English

A composite generalization of Ville's martingale theorem

Probability 2023-05-05 v2 Computer Science and Game Theory Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

We provide a composite version of Ville's theorem that an event has zero measure if and only if there exists a nonnegative martingale which explodes to infinity when that event occurs. This is a classic result connecting measure-theoretic probability to the sequence-by-sequence game-theoretic probability, recently developed by Shafer and Vovk. Our extension of Ville's result involves appropriate composite generalizations of nonnegative martingales and measure-zero events: these are respectively provided by ``e-processes'', and a new inverse capital outer measure. We then develop a novel line-crossing inequality for sums of random variables which are only required to have a finite first moment, which we use to prove a composite version of the strong law of large numbers (SLLN). This allows us to show that violation of the SLLN is an event of outer measure zero and that our e-process explodes to infinity on every such violating sequence, while this is provably not achievable with a nonnegative (super)martingale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.04485,
  title  = {A composite generalization of Ville's martingale theorem},
  author = {Johannes Ruf and Martin Larsson and Wouter M. Koolen and Aaditya Ramdas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.04485},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

21 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:06:49.820Z