Agafonov's Theorem for finite and infinite alphabets and probability distributions different from equidistribution
Abstract
An infinite sequence over an alphabet is -distributed w.r.t. a probability map if, for every finite string , the limiting frequency of in exists and equals . %We raise the question of how to characterize the probability maps for which -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 : every finite-state selector over selects a -distributed sequence from every -distributed sequence \emph{if and only if} is induced by a Bernoulli distribution on , 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 -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 on such that any finite-state selector preserves the property of genericity for , 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}
}