Two-sided shift spaces over infinite alphabets

Ott, Tomforde, and Willis proposed a useful compactification for one-sided shifts over infinite alphabets. Building from their idea we develop a notion of two-sided shift spaces over infinite alphabets, with an eye towards generalizing a result of Kitchens. As with the one-sided shifts over infinite alphabets our shift spaces are compact Hausdorff spaces but, in contrast to the one-sided setting, our shift map is continuous everywhere. We show that many of the classical results from symbolic dynamics are still true for our two-sided shift spaces. In particular, while for one-sided shifts the problem about whether or not any $M$-step shift is conjugate to an edge shift space is open, for two-sided shifts we can give a positive answer for this question.Comment: 32 page

Consistency of Feature Markov Processes

We are studying long term sequence prediction (forecasting). We approach this by investigating criteria for choosing a compact useful state representation. The state is supposed to summarize useful information from the history. We want a method that is asymptotically consistent in the sense it will provably eventually only choose between alternatives that satisfy an optimality property related to the used criterion. We extend our work to the case where there is side information that one can take advantage of and, furthermore, we briefly discuss the active setting where an agent takes actions to achieve desirable outcomes.Comment: 16 LaTeX page

A Generalized Typicality for Abstract Alphabets

A new notion of typicality for arbitrary probability measures on standard Borel spaces is proposed, which encompasses the classical notions of weak and strong typicality as special cases. Useful lemmas about strong typical sets, including conditional typicality lemma, joint typicality lemma, and packing and covering lemmas, which are fundamental tools for deriving many inner bounds of various multi-terminal coding problems, are obtained in terms of the proposed notion. This enables us to directly generalize lots of results on finite alphabet problems to general problems involving abstract alphabets, without any complicated additional arguments. For instance, quantization procedure is no longer necessary to achieve such generalizations. Another fundamental lemma, Markov lemma, is also obtained but its scope of application is quite limited compared to others. Yet, an alternative theory of typical sets for Gaussian measures, free from this limitation, is also developed. Some remarks on a possibility to generalize the proposed notion for sources with memory are also given.Comment: 44 pages; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Attractive regular stochastic chains: perfect simulation and phase transition

We prove that uniqueness of the stationary chain, or equivalently, of the $g$-measure, compatible with an attractive regular probability kernel is equivalent to either one of the following two assertions for this chain: (1) it is a finitary coding of an i.i.d. process with countable alphabet, (2) the concentration of measure holds at exponential rate. We show in particular that if a stationary chain is uniquely defined by a kernel that is continuous and attractive, then this chain can be sampled using a coupling-from-the-past algorithm. For the original Bramson-Kalikow model we further prove that there exists a unique compatible chain if and only if the chain is a finitary coding of a finite alphabet i.i.d. process. Finally, we obtain some partial results on conditions for phase transition for general chains of infinite order.Comment: 22 pages, 1 pseudo-algorithm, 1 figure. Minor changes in the presentation. Lemma 6 has been remove

Phase transitions for suspension flows

This paper is devoted to study thermodynamic formalism for suspension flows defined over countable alphabets. We are mostly interested in the regularity properties of the pressure function. We establish conditions for the pressure function to be real analytic or to exhibit a phase transition. We also construct an example of a potential for which the pressure has countably many phase transitions.Comment: Example 5.2 expanded. Typos corrected. Section 6.1 superced the note "Thermodynamic formalism for the positive geodesic flow on the modular surface" arXiv:1009.462