In
mathematics, the Itô isometry, named after
Kiyoshi Itô, is a crucial fact about
Itô stochastic integrals. One of its main applications is to enable the computation of
variance
In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its population mean or sample mean. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of number ...
s for random variables that are given as Itô integrals.
Let
denote the canonical real-valued
Wiener process
In mathematics, the Wiener process is a real-valued continuous-time stochastic process named in honor of American mathematician Norbert Wiener for his investigations on the mathematical properties of the one-dimensional Brownian motion. It i ...
defined up to time
, and let
be a
stochastic process that is
adapted
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the po ...
to the
natural filtration In the theory of stochastic processes in mathematics and statistics, the generated filtration or natural filtration associated to a stochastic process is a filtration associated to the process which records its "past behaviour" at each time. It ...
of the Wiener process. Then
:
where
denotes
expectation
Expectation or Expectations may refer to:
Science
* Expectation (epistemic)
* Expected value, in mathematical probability theory
* Expectation value (quantum mechanics)
* Expectation–maximization algorithm, in statistics
Music
* ''Expectation' ...
with respect to
classical Wiener measure.
In other words, the Itô integral, as a function from the space
of square-integrable
adapted processes to the space
of square-integrable random variables, is an
isometry
In mathematics, an isometry (or congruence, or congruent transformation) is a distance-preserving transformation between metric spaces, usually assumed to be bijective. The word isometry is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσος ''isos'' mea ...
of
normed vector space
In mathematics, a normed vector space or normed space is a vector space over the real or complex numbers, on which a norm is defined. A norm is the formalization and the generalization to real vector spaces of the intuitive notion of "leng ...
s with respect to the norms induced by the
inner product
In mathematics, an inner product space (or, rarely, a Hausdorff pre-Hilbert space) is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar, often ...
s
:
and
:
As a consequence, the Itô integral respects these inner products as well, i.e. we can write
: