I'm struggling with the concept of conditional expectation. First of all, if you have a link to any explanation that goes beyond showing that it is a generalization of elementary intuitive concepts, please let me know.
Let me get more specific. Let $\left(\Omega,\mathcal{A},P\right)$ be a probability space and $X$ an integrable real random variable defined on $(\Omega,\mathcal{A},P)$. Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a sub-$\sigma$-algebra of $\mathcal{A}$. Then $E[X|\mathcal{F}]$ is the a.s. unique random variable $Y$ such that $Y$ is $\mathcal{F}$-measurable and for any $A\in\mathcal{F}$, $E\left[X1_A\right]=E\left[Y1_A\right]$.
The common interpretation seems to be: "$E[X|\mathcal{F}]$ is the expectation of $X$ given the information of $\mathcal{F}$." I'm finding it hard to get any meaning from this sentence.
In elementary probability theory, expectation is a real number. So the sentence above makes me think of a real number instead of a random variable. This is reinforced by $E[X|\mathcal{F}]$ sometimes being called "conditional expected value". Is there some canonical way of getting real numbers out of $E[X|\mathcal{F}]$ that can be interpreted as elementary expected values of something?
In what way does $\mathcal{F}$ provide information? To know that some event occurred, is something I would call information, and I have a clear picture of conditional expectation in this case. To me $\mathcal{F}$ is not a piece of information, but rather a "complete" set of pieces of information one could possibly acquire in some way.
Maybe you say there is no real intuition behind this, $E[X|\mathcal{F}]$ is just what the definition says it is. But then, how does one see that a martingale is a model of a fair game? Surely, there must be some intuition behind that!
I hope you have got some impression of my misconceptions and can rectify them.
No comments:
Post a Comment