Natural extensions and Gauss measures for piecewise homographic continued fractions

We give a heuristic method to solve explicitly for an absolutely continuous invariant measure for a piecewise differentiable, expanding map of a compact subset $I$ of Euclidean space $R^d$. The method consists of constructing a skew product family of maps on $I\times R^d$, which has an attractor. Lebesgue measure is invariant for the skew product family restricted to this attractor. Under reasonable measure theoretic conditions, integration over the fibers gives the desired measure on $I$. Furthermore, the attractor system is then the natural extension of the original map with this measure. We illustrate this method by relating it to various results in the literature.