Doob's martingale inequality


In mathematics, Doob's martingale inequality, also known as Kolmogorov’s submartingale inequality is a result in the study of stochastic processes. It gives a bound on the probability that a stochastic process exceeds any given value over a given interval of time. As the name suggests, the result is usually given in the case that the process is a martingale, but the result is also valid for submartingales.
The inequality is due to the American mathematician Joseph L. Doob.

Statement of the inequality

Let X be a submartingale taking real values, either in discrete or continuous time. That is, for all times s and t with s < t,
Then, for any constant C > 0,
In the above, as is conventional, P denotes a probability measure on the sample space Ω of the stochastic process
and denotes the expected value with respect to the probability measure P, i.e. the integral
in the sense of Lebesgue integration. denotes the σ-algebra generated by all the random variables Xi with i ≤ s; the collection of such σ-algebras forms a filtration of the probability space.

Further inequalities

There are further submartingale inequalities also due to Doob. With the same assumptions on X as above, let
and for p ≥ 1 let
In this notation, Doob's inequality as stated above reads
The following inequalities also hold :
and, for p > 1,

Related inequalities

Doob's inequality for discrete-time martingales implies Kolmogorov's inequality: if X1, X2,... is a sequence of real-valued independent random variables, each with mean zero, it is clear that
so Sn = X1 + ... + Xn is a martingale. Note that Jensen's inequality implies that |Sn| is a nonnegative submartingale if Sn is a martingale. Hence, taking p = 2 in Doob's martingale inequality,
which is precisely the statement of Kolmogorov's inequality.

Application: Brownian motion

Let B denote canonical one-dimensional Brownian motion. Then
The proof is just as follows: since the exponential function is monotonically increasing, for any non-negative λ,
By Doob's inequality, and since the exponential of Brownian motion is a positive submartingale,
Since the left-hand side does not depend on λ, choose λ to minimize the right-hand side: λ = C/T gives the desired inequality.