On quantitative convergence for stochastic processes: Crossings, fluctuations and martingales

We develop a general framework for extracting highly uniform bounds on local stability for stochastic processes in terms of information on fluctuations or crossings. This includes a large class of martingales: As a corollary of our main abstract result, we obtain a quantitative version of Doob’s convergence theorem for <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="upper L 1"> <mml:semantics> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:msub> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">L_1</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula>-sub- and supermartingales, but more importantly, demonstrate that our framework readily extends to more complex stochastic processes such as almost-supermartingales, thus paving the way for future applications in stochastic optimization. Fundamental to our approach is the use of ideas from logic, particularly a careful analysis of the quantifier structure of probabilistic statements and the introduction of a number of abstract notions that represent stochastic convergence in a quantitative manner. In this sense, our work falls under the ‘proof mining’ program, and indeed, our quantitative results provide new examples of the phenomenon, recently made precise by the first author and Pischke, that many proofs in probability theory are proof-theoretically tame, and amenable to the extraction of quantitative data that is both of low complexity and independent of the underlying probability space.