Set-Valued Stochastic Integrals with Respect to Finite Variation Processes ()
1. Introduction
Recently, integrals for set-valued stochastic processes with respect to Brownian motion, martingales and the Lebesgue measure have received much attention.
In 1997, Kisielewicz ([1]) defined the integral of setvalued process as a subset of
space, but he didn’t consider the measurability of the integral. In 1999, Kim and Kim [2] used the definition of stochastic integrals of set-valued stochastic process with respect to the Brownian motion. They called it Aumann ([3]) type It
integrals. In [4], Jung and Kim modified the definition by taking the decomposable closure such that the integral is measurable. Li and Ren [5] modified Jung and Kim’s definition by considering the predictable set-valued stochastic process as a set-valued random variable in the product space
, and the measurability and decomposability also were based on product
-algebra. After that, Zhang et al. ([6,7]) studied the set-valued integrals with respect to the martingale and Brownian motion.
Stochastic differential inclusions and set-valued stochastic differential (or integral) equations are employed to model the problems with not only randomness but also impreciseness. Recently, there are some references related to set-valued differential equations such as [8-13] etc.
Concerning to the integral with respect to finite variation processes, Malinowski and Michta [12] give the notion of set-valued integral with respect to single valued finite variation but without considering the measurability. Z.Wang and R.Wang [14] defined the Lebesgue-Stieltjes stochastic integral of single valued stochastic processes with respect to set-valued finite variation processes (refer to [14] for the detail).
In this paper, different from the definition in [14], based on the Definition 3.1 in [12], we will study the Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral of set-valued stochastic processes with respect to single valued finite variation process. We shall prove the measurability of integral, namely, it is a set-valued random, which is similar to the classical stochastic integral.
This paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we present some notions and facts on set-valued random variables; in section 3, we shall give the definition of integral of set-valued stochastic processes with respect to finite variation process and then prove the measurability and
-boundedness.
2. Preliminaries
We denote
the set of all natural numbers,
the set of all real numbers,
the d-dimensional Euclidean space with the usual norm
,
the set of all nonnegative numbers. Let
be a complete probability space,
a
-field filtration satisfying the usual conditions. Let
be a Borel field of a topological space
.
Let
(resp.
) be the family of all nonempty, closed (resp. nonempty compact, nonempty compact convex) subsets of
. For any
and
, define the distance between
and A by
. The Hausdorff metric
on
(see e.g. [15]) is defined by
(1)
.
Denote
. For
, we have

For
the support function of
is defined as follows:

: the set of all
—valued Borel measurable functions
such that the norm

is finite.
is called
-integrable if
.
A set-valued function
is said to be measurable if for any open set
, the inverse
belongs to
. Such a function
is called a set-valued random variable.
Let
(resp.
,
) be the family of all measurable
-valued (resp.
-valued) functions, briefly by
(resp.
,
. For
, the family of all
-integrable selections is defined by
(2)
In the following,
is denoted briefly by
.
A set-valued random variable
is said to be integrable if
is nonempty.
is called
-integrably bounded if there exits
s.t. for all
,
almost surely.
An
-valued stochastic process
(or denoted by
) is defined as a function
with the
-measurable section
, for
. We say
is measurable if
is
- measurable. The process
is called
-adapted if
is
-measurable for every
. Let
, where
. We know that
is a
-algebra on
. A function
is measurable and
-adapted if and only if it is
-measurable ([8]).
In a fashion similar to the
-valued stochastic processes, a set-valued stochastic process
is defined as a set-valued function
with
-measurable section
for
. It is called measurable if it is
-measurable, and
- adapted if for any fixed
,
is
-measurable.
is measurable and
-adapted if and only if it is
-measurable.
is called
-integrable if every
is
-integrable.
3. Set-Valued Stochastic Integral w.r.t Finite Variation Processes
Let
be a real valued
-adapted measurable process with finite variation and continuous sample trajectories a.s. from the origin. That is to say, for each compact interval
and any partition
of
, the total variation

is finite and
a.s. Then for any
, the process
can generate a random measure denoted by
in the space
. For any
, let

where
is the decomposition of
,
and
are non-negative and nondecreasing processes,
. In the product space
, set
(3)
for
, where
is the index function. Then the set function
is a finite measure in the measurable space
if and only if
. In the following we always assume
.
Let
be the family of all
-measurable
-valued stochastic processes
such that

For any
and
, the stochastic Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral
is defined by the Bochner integral
pathby-path. One can show that the integral process
is
-measurable.
Note: in [12], the integrand is assumed being predictable, in fact the integrand can be relaxed to the
- measurable class since the integrator
is continuous.
Let
be the family of all
-measurable
-valued stochastic processes
such that

where
. For any
, set
(4)
Definition 1. (see [12]) For a set-valued stochastic process
the set-valued stochastic Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral (over interval
) of
with respect to the finite variation continuous process
is the set

In [12], the authors call this kind of integral as trajectory integral since they consider it as a
-valued random variable. Here, we shall consider it as a subset of
and show the measurability with respect to
, which is very different from the way in [12], also different from other references such as [10,16,17] etc. In fact, for almost every
, the above integral
is a subset of
. In the following, we shall assume the
- algebra
is separable w.r.t
. In addition,
is separable and
, then one can get
is separable. Therefore we can find an
- measurable set
, such that
and for every
, the integral
is defined path-bypath. For
, set
, therefore it is well defined for every
.
since the continuity of
. In the sequel, we shall denote the integral by
instead of
. For any
denote
by
.
Theorem 1. For
,
and
, the Lebesgue-Stieltjes integral
is a compact and convex subset of
.
Proof 1. In fact,
is a bounded and convex subset of
, since
is convex and compact,moreover, it is weakly compact since
is reflexive. The convexity of the integral is obvious.
We shall show the linear operator
:
is bounded.
For any
,
,
(5)
which implies the linear operator
is bounded. Therefore the integral
is weakly compact since the bounded linear operator mapping a weakly compact set to a weakly compact one. In
space, a weakly compact set is compact.
Lemma 1. (see [16] Corollary 2.1.1 (5)) Assume
is a measurable space,
is a separable Banach space,
, and F is a set-valued random variable, then
is measurable.
By using Lemma 1, as a manner similar to Theorem 1 in [17], we have the following result:
Lemma 2. Assume
is the corresponding stochastic process,
for any
, we have 1)
;
2) 
Lemma 3. (see [16] Theorem 2.1.16) Assume
is a measurable space,
is a separable Banach space,
, and for any fixed
is measurable, if one of the following conditions is satisfied:
1)
is separable;
2) for any
.
Then
is a set-valued random variable.
From Lemma 1 and Lemma 3, when
, for any
,
is
-measurable if and only if
is
-measurable.
Lemma 4. ([16] Theorem 1.7.7) If
is a separable space,
are separable metric space
satisfy:
(a) for any
is measurable;
(b) for any
is continuous or is continuous with respect to Hausdorff metricThen
is jointly measurable.
Then by Lemma 1 we have the following:
Lemma 5. Assume
. Then
is
-measurable.
Theorem 2. Assume
. Then
for each
. Furthermore, the mapping
is
-measurable.
Proof 2. Step 1. We will show that
is
- measurable for each
,
is
-measurable.
By Theorem 1, we have
(6)
for all
. Furthermore, we obtain

for all
. Moreover, since
is
-measurable, from the Lemma 5 we can obtain that the function
is
measurable. By Fubini theorem,
is
-measurable, based on Lemma 3,
is
-measurable.
Finally, in the argument above, the function
is
-measurable for each
. Since it is continuous in
for all
, so it is
-measurable. From Lemma 4, we obtain that
is
- measurable.
Step 2. In this step, we will show that
for each
.
For each
and
, we have
(7)
then

Hence,
(8)
which implies

As a manner similar to Theorem 3.8. in [8], we have the Castaing representation as following:
Theorem 3. For a set-valued stochastic process
, there exists a sequence
such that

and, for
,

where cl denotes the closure in
.
Theorem 4. For each
is continuous a.s. with respect to the Hausdorff metric
.
Proof 3. Let
and
. We then have
(9)
Hence,

(10)
since for each
,
. Hence,
. So
is leftcontinuous in
for all a.s. In a similar way, we see that
is right-continuous in
a.s.
Similar to the proof of Theorem 3.15 in [8], we have the following theorem:
Theorem 5. Let
, for any
, we have

and

4. Conclusion
When the integrand takes values in compact and convex subsets of
, we defined the integral with respect to real-valued variation processes. And then we proved some properties of this kind of integral such as measurability,
-boundedness and continuity under the Hausdorff metric.
5. Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the referees for their valuable comments. Moreover, we express special thanks to our editor of the journal APM for his(her) efficiency and support.
NOTES
#Corresponding author.