Abstract
Acapacity is a set function with some regularity properties on a Hausdorff spaceE. Many measures and all sup measures are examples. The set of capacities onE can be endowed with two natural topologies. The narrow topology corresponds to the weak topology for probability measures, while the vague topology corresponds to the vague topology for Radon measures. The connection between these topologies and large-deviation principles was noted in recent joint work with W. Vervaat. Here, the theory of capacities and their topologies is developed in directions which have implications for large-deviation theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Berg, C., Christensen, J. P. R., and Ressel, P. (1984).Harmonic Analysis on Semigroups. Springer.
Billingsley, P. (1968).Convergence of Probability Measures. Wiley and Sons.
Bryc, W., and Dembo, A. (1993). Large deviations and strong mixing. Preprint.
Bucklew, J. A. (1990).Large Deviation Techniques in Decision, Simulation, and Estimation. Wiley and Sons.
Dellacherie, C., and Meyer, P.-A. (1978).Probabilities and Potential. Hermann and North Holland.
Dembo, A., and Zeitouni, O. (1993).Large Deviations Techniques and Applications. A. K. Peters, Wellesley, Massachusetts (Formerly published by Jones and Bartlett, Boston.)
Deuschel, J.-D., and Stroock, D. W. (1989).Large Deviations. Academic.
Dudley, R. M. (1966). Weak convergence of probabilities on nonseparable metric spaces and empirical measures on Euclidean spaces.Illinois J. Math. 10, 109–126.
Ellis, R. S. (1985).Entropy, Large Deviations and Statistical Mechanics. Springer-Verlag.
Gerritse, B. (1993). Varadhan's theorem for capacities. Report 9347, Department of Mathematics, Catholic University of Nijmegen.
Kallenberg, O. (1983).Random Measures. 2nd ed. Academic.
Lynch, J., and Sethuraman, J. (1987). Large deviations for processes with independent increments.Ann. Prob. 15, 610–627.
Norberg, T. (1986). Random capacities and their distributions.Prob. Th. Rel. Fields 73, 281–297.
Norberg, T., and Vervaat, W. (1989). Capacities on non-Hausdorff spaces. Preprint. To appear Vervaat(25). Vervaat, W. (1995).Probability and Lattices, CWI Tract, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatika, Amsterdam (to appear).
O'Brien, G. L., and Vervaat, W. (1991). Capacities, large deviations and loglog laws. In Cambanis, S., Samorodnitsky, G., and Taqqu, M. (eds.),Stable Processes and Related Topics, Birkhauser, pp. 43–84.
O'Brien, G. L., and Vervaat, W. (1994). How subadditive are subadditive capacities?Commentationes Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinas 35, 311–324.
O'Brien, G. L., and Vervaat, W. (1995). Compactness in the theory of large deviations.Stochastic Processes and their Applications 57, 1–10.
O'Brien, G. L., and Watson, S. (1994). Narrow relative compactness of capacities. Preprint.
Parasarathy, K. R. (1967).Probability on Metric Spaces. Academic. New York.
Pukhalskii, A. A. (1991). On functional principle of large deviations. InNew Trends in Probability and Statistics. Sazonov, V., and Shervashidze, T. (eds.), VPS/Mokslas, pp. 198–219.
Topsøe, F. (1970).Topology and Measure. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 133. Springer-Verlag.
Varadhan, S. R. S. (1984).Large Deviations and Applications. SIAM.
Varadhan, S. R. S. (1966). Asymptotic properties and differential equations.Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 19, 261–286.
Vervaat, W. (1988). Random upper semicontinuous functions and extremal processes. Report MS-8801, Center for Math. and Comp. Sci., Amsterdam [to appear Vervaat(25) Vervaat, W. (1995).Probability and Lattices, CWI Tract, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatika, Amsterdam (to appear)].
Vervaat, W. (1995).Probability and Lattices, CWI Tract, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatika, Amsterdam (to appear).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Much of it was done while the author enjoyed the kind hospitality of the Delft University of Technology.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
O'Brien, G.L. Sequences of capacities, with connections to large-deviation theory. J Theor Probab 9, 19–35 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02213733
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02213733