Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In (5) a weak convergence result for U-statistics was obtained as a special case of a reverse martingale theorem; in (7) Miller and Sen obtained another such result for U-statistics by a direct argument. As they stand these results are not very closely connected, since one is concerned with U-statistics Uk for k ≥ n, while the other deals with Uk for k ≤ n, but if one instead thinks of k as unrestricted and transforms the random functions Xn which enter into one of these results into new functions Yn by setting Yn(t) = tXn(t−1) one finds that the Yn are (aside from variations in interpolated values) just the functions with which the other result is concerned. As the limiting Wiener process W is well-known to have the property that tW(t−1) is another Wiener process it is not too surprising that both results should hold, and part of the purpose of this paper is to provide a general framework within which the relationship between these results will become clear. A second purpose is to illustrate the simplification that the martingale property brings to weak convergence studies; this is shown both in the U-statistic example and in a new proof of the convergence of the empirical process.