Multiple Markov properties for fractional parabolic SPDEs

Abstract

Spatiotemporal stochastic processes have applications in various fields, but they can be difficult to numerically approximate in a reasonable time, in particular, in the context of statistical inference for large datasets.
Recently, a new approach for efficient spatiotemporal statistical modeling has been proposed, where the space-time stochastic processes are constructed as solutions to a certain class of fractional-order parabolic stochastic partial differential equations. Until now, the solution concepts, that have been formulated for these stochastic equations, either assume zero initial conditions for the process itself and (if existent) for all of its (mean-square temporal) derivatives, or set all (existing) higher-order derivatives at the starting time to zero. The aim of this thesis is twofold: Firstly, we generalize this class of stochastic processes in such a way that non-zero initial conditions (for the process and its temporal derivatives) can be meaningfully incorporated. Secondly, we show that for certain (integer) values of the parameter corresponding to the fractional power of the parabolic operator, the solutions satisfy certain Markov properties.
To this end, we first generalize the integration domain of stochastic Hilbert-space-valued Itô integrals to the whole real line. Afterwards, we present the modified spatiotemporal stochastic processes that facilitate incorporating nonzero initial conditions for the process and its derivatives at a given initial time. Lastly, we show that this proposed process satisfies a so-called multiple Markov property under certain conditions. Markov properties are desirable in numerical applications, because a Markov process allows for a much faster numerical approximation of its covariance operator.