The level of self-organized criticality in oscillating Brownian motion: $n$-consistency and stable Poisson-type convergence of the MLE

Abstract

For some discretely observed path of oscillating Brownian motion with level of self-organized criticality $\rho_0$, we prove in the infill asymptotics that the MLE is $n$-consistent, where $n$ denotes the sample size, and derive its limit distribution with respect to stable convergence. As the transition density of this homogeneous Markov process is not even continuous in $\rho_0$, the analysis is highly non-standard. Therefore, interesting and somewhat unexpected phenomena occur: The likelihood function splits into several components, each of them contributing very differently depending on how close the argument $\rho$ is to $\rho_0$. Correspondingly, the MLE is successively excluded to lay outside a compact set, a $1/\sqrt{n}$-neighborhood and finally a $1/n$-neighborhood of $\rho_0$ asymptotically. The crucial argument to derive the stable convergence is to exploit the semimartingale structure of the sequential suitably rescaled local log-likelihood function (as a process in time). Both sequentially and as a process in $\rho$, it exhibits a bivariate Poissonian behavior in the stable limit with its intensity being a multiple of the local time at $\rho_0$.