The course will start from scratch in the sense that the only required background is calculus-based integration and probability theory. Basic concepts in integration and measure theory will be introduced from first principles, and then the course will explain how these concepts form the foundation for probability and random processes based on measure theory.
A preliminary course outline is provided below.
Lecture 1: Lebesgue measure on the real line
Lecture 2: The Lebesgue integral on the real line
Lecture 3: General measure theory
- Measure spaces and measurable functions
- Convergence in measure
Lecture 4: General integration theory
- The abstract Lebesgue integral
- Distribution functions and the Lebesgue–Stieltjes integral
Lecture 5: Probability and expectation
- Probability spaces
- Expectation
- The law of large numbers for i.i.d. sequences
Lecture 6: Differentiation
- Functions of bounded variation
- Absolutely continuous functions
- The Radon–Nikodym derivative
- Probability distributions and pdf’s; absolutely continuous random variables
Lecture 7: Conditional probability and expectation
- Conditional probability/expectation
- Decomposition of measures; continuous, mixed and discrete random variables
Lecture 8: Topological and metric spaces
- Topological and metric spaces
- Completeness and separability, Polish spaces
- Standard spaces
Lecture 9: Extensions of measures and product measure
- Extension theorems
- Product measure
Lecture 10: Random processes
- Process measure, Kolmogorov’s extension theorem
Lecture 11: Dynamical systems and ergodicity
- Random processes and dynamical systems
- The ergodic theorem
- The Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem
Lecture 12: Applications
- Detection and estimation in abstract spaces
- Coding theorems in abstract spaces