English

Agafonov's Theorem for finite and infinite alphabets and probability distributions different from equidistribution

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2022-11-16 v3 Dynamical Systems Probability

Abstract

An infinite sequence α\alpha over an alphabet Σ\Sigma is μ\mu-distributed w.r.t. a probability map μ\mu if, for every finite string ww, the limiting frequency of ww in α\alpha exists and equals μ(w)\mu(w). %We raise the question of how to characterize the probability maps μ\mu for which μ\mu-distributedness is preserved across finite-state selection, or equivalently, by selection by programs using constant space. We prove the following result for any finite or countably infinite alphabet Σ\Sigma: every finite-state selector over Σ\Sigma selects a μ\mu-distributed sequence from every μ\mu-distributed sequence \emph{if and only if} μ\mu is induced by a Bernoulli distribution on Σ\Sigma, that is a probability distribution on the alphabet extended to words by taking the product. The primary -- and remarkable -- consequence of our main result is a complete characterization of the set of probability maps, on finite and infinite alphabets, for which finite-state selection preserves μ\mu-distributedness. The main positive takeaway is that (the appropriate generalization of) Agafonov's Theorem holds for Bernoulli distributions (rather than just equidistributions) on both finite and countably infinite alphabets. As a further consequence, we obtain a result in the area of symbolic dynamical systems: the shift-invariant measures μ\mu on Σω\Sigma^{\omega} such that any finite-state selector preserves the property of genericity for μ\mu, are exactly the positive Bernoulli measures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.08552,
  title  = {Agafonov's Theorem for finite and infinite alphabets and probability distributions different from equidistribution},
  author = {Thomas Seiller and Jakob Grue Simonsen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.08552},
  year   = {2022}
}