Lévy processes conditioned to stay in a half-space with applications to directional extremes

Abstract

This paper provides a multivariate extension of Bertoin’s pathwise construction of a Lévy process conditioned to stay positive or negative. Thus obtained processes conditioned to stay in half-spaces are closely related to the original process on a compact time interval seen from its directional extremal points. In the case of a correlated Brownian motion the law of the conditioned process is obtained by a linear transformation of a standard Brownian motion and an independent Bessel-3 process. Further motivation is provided by a limit theorem corresponding to zooming in on a Lévy process with a Brownian part at the point of its directional infimum. Applications to zooming in at the point furthest from the origin are envisaged.

Keywords

• Conditioning to stay positive
• directional extremes
• exchangeability
• local behavior
• Sparre Andersen identity