Karhunen–Loève expansion of random measures

Université de Paris II: Panthéon-Assas, 92 rue d’Assas, 75006 Paris

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Received: 28 July 2022
Accepted: 17 December 2025

Abstract

We present an orthogonal expansion for real, function-regulated, second-order random measures over ℝ^d with measure covariance. Such an expansion, which can be seen as a Karhunen– Loève decomposition, consists in a series of deterministic real measures weighted by uncorrelated real random variables with the variances forming a convergent series. The convergence of the series is in a mean-square sense stochastically and against measurable and bounded test functions (with compact support if the random measure is not finite) in the measure sense, which implies set-wise convergence. This is proven taking advantage of the extra requirement of having a covariance measure over ℝ^d × ℝ^d describing the covariance structure of the random measure, for which we also provide a series expansion. These results cover for instance the cases of Gaussian White Noise, Poisson and Cox point processes, and can be used to obtain expansions for trawl processes.