Itō isometry

In mathematics, the Itō isometry, named after Kiyoshi Itō, is a crucial fact about Itō stochastic integrals. One of its main applications is to enable the computation of variances for stochastic processes.

Let $W : [0, T] \times \Omega \to \mathbb{R}$ denote the canonical real-valued Wiener process defined up to time $T > 0$, and let $X : [0, T] \times \Omega \to \mathbb{R}$ be a stochastic process that is adapted to the natural filtration $\mathcal{F}_{*}^{W}$ of the Wiener process. Then

$\mathbb{E} \left[ \left( \int_{0}^{T} X_{t} \, \mathrm{d} W_{t} \right)^{2} \right] = \mathbb{E} \left[ \int_{0}^{T} X_{t}^{2} \, \mathrm{d} t \right],$

where $\mathbb{E}$ denotes expectation with respect to classical Wiener measure $\gamma$. In other words, the Itō stochastic integral, as a function, is an isometry of normed vector spaces with respect to the norms induced by the inner products

$( X, Y )_{L^{2} (W)} := \mathbb{E} \left( \int_{0}^{T} X_{t} \, \mathrm{d} W_{t} \int_{0}^{T} Y_{t} \, \mathrm{d} W_{t} \right) = \int_{\Omega} \left( \int_{0}^{T} X_{t} \, \mathrm{d} W_{t} \int_{0}^{T} Y_{t} \, \mathrm{d} W_{t} \right) \, \mathrm{d} \gamma (\omega)$

and

$( A, B )_{L^{2} (\Omega)} := \mathbb{E} ( A B ) = \int_{\Omega} A(\omega) B(\omega) \, \mathrm{d} \gamma (\omega).$

References

• Øksendal, Bernt K. (2003). Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications. Springer, Berlin. ISBN 3-540-04758-1.