English

Finite Partially Exchangeable Laws are Signed Mixtures of Product Laws

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2017-08-15 v3 Probability

Abstract

Given a partition {I1,,Ik}\{I_1,\ldots,I_k\} of {1,,n}\{1,\ldots,n\}, let (X1,,Xn)(X_1,\ldots,X_n) be random vector with each XiX_i taking values in an arbitrary measurable space (S,S)(S,\mathscr{S}) such that their joint law is invariant under finite permutations of the indexes within each class IjI_j. Then, it is shown that this law has to be a signed mixture of independent laws and identically distributed within each class IjI_j. The representation is unique if and only if the set of these signed measures is weakly compact. We provide a necessary condition for the existence of a nonnegative directing measure. This is related to the notions of infinite extendibility and reinforcement. In the special case where (X1,,Xn)(X_1,\ldots,X_n) is an exchangeable sequence of {0,1}\{0,1\}-valued random variables, the directing measure can be chosen nonnegative if and only if two effectively computable matrices are positive semi-definite.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.08442,
  title  = {Finite Partially Exchangeable Laws are Signed Mixtures of Product Laws},
  author = {Paolo Leonetti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.08442},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

13 pp, Section 1 partly rewritten