Exchangeability and randomness for infinite and finite sequences
Statistics Theory
2026-01-21 v2 Methodology
Statistics Theory
Abstract
Randomness (in the sense of being generated in an IID fashion) and exchangeability are standard assumptions in nonparametric statistics and machine learning, and relations between them have been a popular topic of research. This short paper draws the reader's attention to the fact that, while for infinite sequences of observations the two assumptions are almost indistinguishable, the difference between them becomes very significant for finite sequences of a given length.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.22162,
title = {Exchangeability and randomness for infinite and finite sequences},
author = {Vladimir Vovk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.22162},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
18 pages, 2 figures