Duality and the Well-Posedness of a Martingale Problem

For two Polish state spaces EX and EY, and an operator GX, we obtain existence and uniqueness of a GX-martingale problem provided there is a bounded continuous duality function H on EX×EY together with a dual process Y on EY which is the unique solution of a GY-martingale problem. For the corresponding solutions (Xt)t≥0 and (Yt)t≥0, duality with respect to a function H in its simplest form means that the relation Ex[H(Xt,y)]=Ey[H(x,Yt)] holds for all (x,y)∈EX×EY and t≥0. While duality is well-known to imply uniqueness of the GX-martingale problem, we give here a set of conditions under which duality also implies existence without using approximating sequences of processes of a different kind (e.g. jump processes to approximate diffusions) which is a widespread strategy for proving existence of solutions of martingale problems. Given the process (Yt)t≥0 and a duality function H, to prove existence of (Xt)t≥0 one has to show that the r.h.s. of the duality relation defines for each y a measure on EX, i.e. there are transition kernels (μt)t≥0 from EX to EX such that Ey[H(x,Yt)]=∫μt(x,dx′)H(x′,y) for all (x,y)∈EX×EY and all t≥0.As examples, we treat resampling and branching models, such as the Fleming–Viot measure-valued diffusion and its spatial counterparts (with both, discrete and continuum space), as well as branching systems, such as Feller’s branching diffusion. While our main result as well as all examples come with (locally) compact state spaces, we discuss the strategy to lift our results to genealogy-valued processes or historical processes, leading to non-compact (discrete and continuum) state spaces. Such applications will be tackled in forthcoming work based on the present article.