I read somewhere that stable law is the special case of infinitely divisible. In other word, stable distribution is a special case of infinitely divisible distribution.
But I am not quite sure what differentiate both of them apart.
I read somewhere that stable law is the special case of infinitely divisible. In other word, stable distribution is a special case of infinitely divisible distribution.
But I am not quite sure what differentiate both of them apart.
Every stable law is infinitely divisible, but some infinitely divisible laws are not stable. An example of the latter is the Poisson distribution. For each $\lambda > 0$ and each $n\in\{1,2,3,\ldots\}$, there exist independent random variables $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ each distributed as $\mathrm{Poisson}(\lambda/n)$, so that $X_1+\cdots+X_n\sim\mathrm{Poisson}(\lambda)$. Thus each Poisson distribution is infinitely divisible. But the Poisson distribution is not stable, since, if you add two independent identically distributed random variables $X$ and $Y$, each with a Poisson distribution, what you get does not have the same distribution as $\alpha X+\beta$ for some $\alpha,\beta\in\mathbb R$.
If a random variable $X$ is infinitely divisible, then for each $n$ we can write $$X = Y_1 + \cdots + Y_n$$ for some i.i.d. random variables $Y_i$. (Infinitely is a bit of a misnomer here -- all we really mean is that $n$ can be arbitrarily large.)
If $X$ is stable, then we can moreover do this in such a way that the $Y_i$ have the same distribution as $X$, up to scaling.
It seems like Poisson distribution would satisfy this definition, i.e. $X_1 +···+ X_n = c_n X +d_n$, – Liam Nousa Mar 29 '16 at 05:07