Algorithmic statistics: forty years later

Algorithmic statistics has two different (and almost orthogonal) motivations. From the philosophical point of view, it tries to formalize how the statistics works and why some statistical models are better than others. After this notion of a "good model" is introduced, a natural question arises: it is possible that for some piece of data there is no good model? If yes, how often these bad ("non-stochastic") data appear "in real life"? Another, more technical motivation comes from algorithmic information theory. In this theory a notion of complexity of a finite object (=amount of information in this object) is introduced; it assigns to every object some number, called its algorithmic complexity (or Kolmogorov complexity). Algorithmic statistic provides a more fine-grained classification: for each finite object some curve is defined that characterizes its behavior. It turns out that several different definitions give (approximately) the same curve. In this survey we try to provide an exposition of the main results in the field (including full proofs for the most important ones), as well as some historical comments. We assume that the reader is familiar with the main notions of algorithmic information (Kolmogorov complexity) theory.Comment: Missing proofs adde

Limits of permutation sequences

A permutation sequence is said to be convergent if the density of occurrences of every fixed permutation in the elements of the sequence converges. We prove that such a convergent sequence has a natural limit object, namely a Lebesgue measurable function $Z:[0,1]^2 \to [0,1]$ with the additional properties that, for every fixed $x \in [0,1]$, the restriction $Z(x,\cdot)$ is a cumulative distribution function and, for every $y \in [0,1]$, the restriction $Z(\cdot,y)$ satisfies a "mass" condition. This limit process is well-behaved: every function in the class of limit objects is a limit of some permutation sequence, and two of these functions are limits of the same sequence if and only if they are equal almost everywhere. An ingredient in the proofs is a new model of random permutations, which generalizes previous models and might be interesting for its own sake.Comment: accepted for publication in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1106.166

C1,αC^{1,\alpha}-rectifiability in low codimension in Heisenberg groups

A natural notion of higher order rectifiability is introduced for subsets of Heisenberg groups $\mathbb{H}^n$ in terms of covering a set almost everywhere by a countable union of $(\mathbf{C}_H^{1,\alpha},\mathbb{H})$-regular surfaces, for some $0 < \alpha \leq 1$. We prove that a sufficient condition for $C^{1,\alpha}$-rectifiability of low-codimensional subsets in Heisenberg groups is the almost everywhere existence of suitable approximate tangent paraboloids.Comment: Corrected typos. Added more information in Section 2.1 (preliminaries) and detailed proofs in Section 2.2. Added Lemma 3.3 and modified the main proof (Section 3.1) accordingl

Orbit closures in the enhanced nilpotent cone

We study the orbits of $G=\mathrm{GL}(V)$ in the enhanced nilpotent cone $V\times\mathcal{N}$, where $\mathcal{N}$ is the variety of nilpotent endomorphisms of $V$. These orbits are parametrized by bipartitions of $n=\dim V$, and we prove that the closure ordering corresponds to a natural partial order on bipartitions. Moreover, we prove that the local intersection cohomology of the orbit closures is given by certain bipartition analogues of Kostka polynomials, defined by Shoji. Finally, we make a connection with Kato's exotic nilpotent cone in type C, proving that the closure ordering is the same, and conjecturing that the intersection cohomology is the same but with degrees doubled.Comment: 32 pages. Update (August 2010): There is an error in the proof of Theorem 4.7, in this version and the almost-identical published version. See the corrigendum arXiv:1008.1117 for independent proofs of later results that depend on that statemen