Fractional Brownian motion

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A normalized fractional Brownian motion (denoted fBm) $W^H_t$ on $[0,T], T\in \mathbb{R}$ is a continuous-time Gaussian process starting at zero, with mean zero, and having the following correlation function:

$E[W^H_t W^H_s]=\frac{1}{2} (|t|^{2H}+|s|^{2H}-|t-s|^{2H}),$

where $H$ , called the Hurst index or Hurst parameter associated to the fractional Brownian motion, is a real number in $[0,1]$ .

The value of $H$ determines what kind of process the fBm is:

if $H = 1 / 2$ , the process is in fact a regular Brownian motion;
if $H > 1 / 2$ , the increments of the process are positively correlated;
if $H < 1 / 2$ , the increments of the process are negatively correlated.

1 Properties
2 Sample paths
3 Applications

[edit] Properties

[edit] Self-similarity

The process is said to be self-similar, since in terms of distributions:

$B^H(at)\sim |a|^{H}B^H(t).$

[edit] Long-range dependence

For $H > 1 / 2$ , the process exhibits long-range dependence, which means that

$\sum_{n=1}^\infty{E[B^H_1(B^H_{n+1}-B^H_n)]}=\infty.$

[edit] Regularity

Sample-paths are almost nowhere differentiable. Precisely, almost-all trajectories are Hölder continuous of any order strictly less than $H$ : for each trajectory, there exists a constant $c$ such that

$|B^H(t)-B^H(s)| \le c |t-s|^{H-\varepsilon}$

for any $\varepsilon >0$ .

[edit] Integration

As for regular Brownian motion, one can define stochastic integrals with respect to fractional Brownian motion, usually called "fractional stochastic integrals". In general though, unlike integrals with respect to regular Brownian motion, fractional stochastic integrals are not Martingales.

[edit] Sample paths

Practical computer realisations of fBm can be generated, although obviously they cannot really be fractal. The sample paths chosen can be thought of as showing discrete sampled points on an fBm process. Three realisations are shown below, each with 1000 points of fBm with Hurst parameter 0.75.


H=0.75 realisation 1	H=0.75 realisation 2	H=0.75 realisation 3

Two realisations are shown below, each showing 1000 points of fBm, the first with Hurst parameter 0.95 and the second with Hurst parameter 0.55.


H=0.95	H=0.55

[edit] Applications

Fractional Brownian motion was initially used in the modelling of hydrological phenomena. It has been shown that fBm can be suitable for the analysis of computer network traffic. By the end of the twentieth century, it was used in as various fields as financial mathematics or random landscape generation. Currently among the popular methods for the analysis of these processes are Wavelets-based methods.

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Category: Stochastic processes