Inferring the Residual Waiting Time for Binary Stationary Time Series

summary:For a binary stationary time series define $\sigma_n$ to be the number of consecutive ones up to the first zero encountered after time $n$, and consider the problem of estimating the conditional distribution and conditional expectation of $\sigma_n$ after one has observed the first $n$ outputs. We present a sequence of stopping times and universal estimators for these quantities which are pointwise consistent for all ergodic binary stationary processes. In case the process is a renewal process with zero the renewal state the stopping times along which we estimate have density one