Infinitely divisible stochastic processes

Summary It often happens that a stochastic process may be approximated by a sum of a large number of independent components no one of which contributes a significant proportion of the whole. For example the depth of water in a lake with many small rivers flowing into it from distant sources, or the point process of calls entering a telephone exchange (considered as the sum of a number of point processes of calls made by individual subscribers) may approximately fulfil these hypotheses. In the present work we formulate and solve the problem of characterizing stochastic processes all of whose finite-dimensional distributions are infinitely divisible. Although some of our results could be derived from known theorems on probabilities on general algebraic structures, many could not and it seems preferable to take the vector-valued infinitely divisible laws as our starting point. We emphasize that an infinitely divisible process (in our sense) on the real line is not necessarily a decomposable process in the sense of Lévy (cf. § 4) though decomposable processes are particular cases.In § 1 a representation theorem for non-negative (and possibly infinite) stochastic processes is derived, while an analogous theorem in the real-valued case is to be found in § 2. § 3 is devoted to the statement of a central limit theorem and the investigation of some of the properties of infinitely divisible processes. The investigation is continued in § 4 by an examination of processes on the real line giving, for example, a representation theorem under weak conditions for infinitely divisible processes which are a.s. sample continuous. Finally in § 5 a study is made of infinitely divisible point processes and random measures.The author is indebted to Professor J. F. C. Kingman for advice and encouragement.