Convergence of the Smoothed Empirical Process in Nested Distance

Abstract

The nested distance, also process distance, provides a quantitative measure of distance for stochastic processes. It is the crucial and determining distance for stochastic optimization problems.In this paper we demonstrate first that the empirical measure, which is built from observed sample paths, does not converge in nested distance to its underlying distribution. We show that smoothing convolutions, which are appropriately adapted from classical density estimation using kernels, can be employed to modify the empirical measure in order to obtain stochastic processes, which converge in nested distance to the underlying process. We employ the results to estimate transition probabilities at each time moment. Finally we construct processes with discrete sample space from observed empirical paths, which approximate well the original stochastic process as they converge in nested distance.