Rough paths, signatures and the modelling of functions on streams

Rough path theory is focused on capturing and making precise the interactions between highly oscillatory and non-linear systems. The techniques draw particularly on the analysis of LC Young and the geometric algebra of KT Chen. The concepts and theorems, and the uniform estimates, have found widespread application; the first applications gave simplified proofs of basic questions from the large deviation theory and substantially extending Ito’s theory of SDEs; the recent applications contribute to (Graham) automated recognition of Chinese handwriting and (Hairer) formulation of appropriate SPDEs to model randomly evolving interfaces. At the heart of the mathematics is the challenge of describing a smooth but potentially highly oscillatory and vector valued path xt parsimoniously so as to effectively predict the response of a nonlinear system such as dyt = f(yt)dxt, y0 = a. The Signature is a homomorphism from the monoid of paths into the grouplike elements of a closed tensor algebra. It provides a graduated summary of the path x. Hambly and Lyons have shown that this non-commutative transform is faithful for paths of bounded variation up to appropriate null modifications. Among paths of bounded variation with given Signature there is always a unique shortest representative. These graduated summaries or features of a path are at the heart of the definition of a rough path; locally they remove the need to look at the fine structure of the path. Taylor’s theorem explains how any smooth function can, locally, be expressed as a linear combination of certain special functions (monomials based at that point). Coordinate iterated integrals form a more subtle algebra of features that can describe a stream or path in an analogous way; they allow a definition of rough path and a natural linear “basis” for functions on streams that can be used for machine learning