English

Random subsets of Cantor sets generated by trees of coin flips

Probability 2025-06-24 v2 Classical Analysis and ODEs

Abstract

We introduce a natural way to construct a random subset of a homogeneous Cantor set CC in [0,1][0,1] via random labelings of an infinite MM-ary tree, where M2M\geq 2. The Cantor set CC is the attractor of an equicontractive iterated function system {f1,,fN}\{f_1,\dots,f_N\} that satisfies the open set condition with (0,1)(0,1) as the open set. For a fixed probability vector (p1,,pN)(p_1,\dots,p_N), each edge in the infinite MM-ary tree is independently labeled ii with probability pip_i, for i=1,2,,Ni=1,2,\dots,N. Thus, each infinite path in the tree receives a random label sequence of numbers from {1,2,,N}\{1,2,\dots,N\}. We define FF to be the (random) set of those points xCx\in C which have a coding that is equal to the label sequence of some infinite path starting at the root of the tree. The set FF may be viewed as a statistically self-similar set with extreme overlaps, and as such, its Hausdorff and box-counting dimensions coincide. We prove non-trivial upper and lower bounds for this dimension, and obtain the exact dimension in a few special cases. For instance, when M=NM=N and pi=1/Np_i=1/N for each ii, we show that FF is almost surely of full Hausdorff dimension in CC but of zero Hausdorff measure in its dimension. For the case of two maps and a binary tree, we also consider deterministic labelings of the tree where, for a fixed integer m2m\geq 2, every mmth edge is labeled 11, and compute the exact Hausdorff dimension of the resulting subset of CC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.04569,
  title  = {Random subsets of Cantor sets generated by trees of coin flips},
  author = {Pieter Allaart and Taylor Jones},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04569},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

21 pages, 5 figures. The paper has been substantially revised and now contains a more general result