Power law Polya's urn and fractional Brownian motion
Abstract
We introduce a natural family of random walks on the set of integers that scale to fractional Brownian motion. The increments X_n have the property that given {X_k: k < n}, the conditional law of X_n is that of X_{n-k_n}, where k_n is sampled independently from a fixed law \mu on the positive integers. When \mu has a roughly power law decay (precisely, when it lies in the domain of attraction of an \alpha stable subordinator, for 0 < \alpha < 1/2) the walk scales to fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter \alpha + 1/2. The walks are easy to simulate and their increments satisfy an FKG inequality. In a sense we describe, they are the natural "fractional" analogs of simple random walk on Z.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0903.1284,
title = {Power law Polya's urn and fractional Brownian motion},
author = {Alan Hammond and Scott Sheffield},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.1284},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
32 pages. An appendix offering some tentative asset-price interpretations has been added; the submitted version (which does not contain the appendix) will appear in Probab. Theory and Related Fields