English

The infinite extendibility problem for exchangeable real-valued random vectors

Probability 2020-11-06 v2

Abstract

We survey known solutions to the infinite extendibility problem for (necessarily exchangeable) probability laws on Rd\mathbb{R}^d, which is: Can a given random vector X=(X1,,Xd)\vec{X} = (X_1,\ldots,X_d) be represented in distribution as the first dd members of an infinite exchangeable sequence of random variables? This is the case if and only if X\vec{X} has a stochastic representation that is "conditionally iid" according to the seminal de Finetti's Theorem. Of particular interest are cases in which the original motivation behind the model X\vec{X} is not one of conditional independence. After an introduction and some general theory, the survey covers the traditional cases when X\vec{X} takes values in {0,1}d\{0,1\}^d has a spherical law, a law with 1\ell_1-norm symmetric survival function, or a law with \ell_{\infty}-norm symmetric density. The solutions in all These cases constitute analytical characterizations of mixtures of iid sequences drawn from popular, one-parametric probability laws on R\mathbb{R}, like the Bernoulli, the normal, the exponential, or the uniform distribution. The survey further covers the less traditional cases when X\vec{X} has a Marshall-Olkin distribution, a multivariate wide-sense geometric distribution, a multivariate extreme-value distribution, or is defined as a certain exogenous shock model including the special case when its components are samples from a Dirichlet prior. The solutions in these cases correspond to iid sequences drawn from random distribution functions defined in terms of popular families of non-decreasing stochastic processes, like a L\'evy subordinator, a random walk, a process that is strongly infinitely divisible with respect to time, or an additive process. The survey finishes with a list of potentially interesting open problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.04054,
  title  = {The infinite extendibility problem for exchangeable real-valued random vectors},
  author = {Jan-Frederik Mai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.04054},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:15:52.781Z