Proof of the Diaconis--Freedman Conjecture on partially-exchangeable processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Halberstam, Noah, Hutchcroft, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Halberstam, Noah
Hutchcroft, Tom
author_facet Halberstam, Noah
Hutchcroft, Tom
contents We prove a conjecture of Diaconis and Freedman (Ann. Probab. 1980) characterising the extreme points of the set of partially-exchangeable processes on a countable set. More concretely, we prove that the partially exchangeable sigma-algebra of any transient partially exchangeable process $X=(X_i)_{i\geq 0}$ (and hence any transient Markov chain) coincides up to null sets with the sigma-algebra generated by the initial state $X_0$ and the transition counts $( \#\{i\geq 0: X_i=x, X_{i+1}=y\} : x,y\in S)$. Our proof is based on an analysis of Gibbs measures for Eulerian paths on rooted digraphs, relying in particular on the connection to uniform spanning trees and Wilson's algorithm via the de Bruijn--Ehrenfest--Smith--Tutte (BEST) bijection, and yields an explicit method to sample from the conditional distribution of a transient Markov chain given its transition counts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20276
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Proof of the Diaconis--Freedman Conjecture on partially-exchangeable processes
Halberstam, Noah
Hutchcroft, Tom
Probability
We prove a conjecture of Diaconis and Freedman (Ann. Probab. 1980) characterising the extreme points of the set of partially-exchangeable processes on a countable set. More concretely, we prove that the partially exchangeable sigma-algebra of any transient partially exchangeable process $X=(X_i)_{i\geq 0}$ (and hence any transient Markov chain) coincides up to null sets with the sigma-algebra generated by the initial state $X_0$ and the transition counts $( \#\{i\geq 0: X_i=x, X_{i+1}=y\} : x,y\in S)$. Our proof is based on an analysis of Gibbs measures for Eulerian paths on rooted digraphs, relying in particular on the connection to uniform spanning trees and Wilson's algorithm via the de Bruijn--Ehrenfest--Smith--Tutte (BEST) bijection, and yields an explicit method to sample from the conditional distribution of a transient Markov chain given its transition counts.
title Proof of the Diaconis--Freedman Conjecture on partially-exchangeable processes
topic Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20276