English

L\'evy processes conditioned on having a large height process

Probability 2012-03-21 v3

Abstract

In the present work, we consider spectrally positive L\'evy processes (Xt,t0)(X_t,t\geq0) not drifting to ++\infty and we are interested in conditioning these processes to reach arbitrarily large heights (in the sense of the height process associated with XX) before hitting 0. This way we obtain a new conditioning of L\'evy processes to stay positive. The (honest) law \pfl\pfl of this conditioned process is defined as a Doob hh-transform via a martingale. For L\'evy processes with infinite variation paths, this martingale is (\rt~(dz)eαz+It)\2tT0(\int\tilde\rt(\mathrm{d}z)e^{\alpha z}+I_t)\2{t\leq T_0} for some α\alpha and where (It,t0)(I_t,t\geq0) is the past infimum process of XX, where (\rt~,t0)(\tilde\rt,t\geq0) is the so-called \emph{exploration process} defined in Duquesne, 2002, and where T0T_0 is the hitting time of 0 for XX. Under \pfl\pfl, we also obtain a path decomposition of XX at its minimum, which enables us to prove the convergence of \pfl\pfl as x0x\to0. When the process XX is a compensated compound Poisson process, the previous martingale is defined through the jumps of the future infimum process of XX. The computations are easier in this case because XX can be viewed as the contour process of a (sub)critical \emph{splitting tree}. We also can give an alternative characterization of our conditioned process in the vein of spine decompositions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.2245,
  title  = {L\'evy processes conditioned on having a large height process},
  author = {Mathieu Richard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.2245},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

34 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:20:57.581Z