Cylinder set measure

In mathematics, cylinder set measure (or promeasure, or premeasure, or quasi-measure, or CSM) is a kind of prototype for a measure on an infinite-dimensional vector space. An example is the Gaussian cylinder set measure on Hilbert space.

Cylinder set measures are in general not measures (and in particular need not be countably additive but only finitely additive), but can be used to define measures, such as the classical Wiener measure on the set of continuous paths starting at the origin in Euclidean space. This is done in the construction of the abstract Wiener space where one defines a cylinder set Gaussian measure on a separable Hilbert space and chooses a Banach space in such a way that the cylindrical measure becomes σ-additive on the cylindrical algebra.

The terminology is not always consistent in the literature. Some authors call cylinder set measures just cylinder measure or cylindrical measures (see e.g.), while some reserve this word only for σ-additive measures.