Algorithmic identification of probabilities is hard
Abstract
Suppose that we are given an infinite binary sequence which is random for a Bernoulli measure of parameter . By the law of large numbers, the frequency of zeros in the sequence tends to~, and thus we can get better and better approximations of as we read the sequence. We study in this paper a similar question, but from the viewpoint of inductive inference. We suppose now that is a computable real, but one asks for more: as we are reading more and more bits of our random sequence, we have to eventually guess the exact parameter (in the form of a Turing code). Can one do such a thing uniformly on all sequences that are random for computable Bernoulli measures, or even on a `large enough' fraction of them? In this paper, we give a negative answer to this question. In fact, we prove a very general negative result which extends far beyond the class of Bernoulli measures.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1405.5139,
title = {Algorithmic identification of probabilities is hard},
author = {Laurent Bienvenu and Santiago Figueira and Benoit Monin and Alexander Shen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.5139},
year = {2018}
}