Estimating the Lengths of Memory Words

dc.creatorMorvai, Gusztav
dc.creatorWeiss, Benjamin
dc.date2008-08-21
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T09:57:42Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T09:57:42Z
dc.descriptionFor a stationary stochastic process $\{X_n\}$ with values in some set $A$, a finite word $w \in A^K$ is called a memory word if the conditional probability of $X_0$ given the past is constant on the cylinder set defined by $X_{-K}^{-1}=w$. It is a called a minimal memory word if no proper suffix of $w$ is also a memory word. For example in a $K$-step Markov processes all words of length $K$ are memory words but not necessarily minimal. We consider the problem of determining the lengths of the longest minimal memory words and the shortest memory words of an unknown process $\{X_n\}$ based on sequentially observing the outputs of a single sample $\{ξ_1,ξ_2,...ξ_n\}$. We will give a universal estimator which converges almost surely to the length of the longest minimal memory word and show that no such universal estimator exists for the length of the shortest memory word. The alphabet $A$ may be finite or countable.
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2964
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2964
dc.identifierIEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 54, No. 8. (2008), pp. 3804-3807
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/167444
dc.subjectInformation Theory
dc.titleEstimating the Lengths of Memory Words
dc.typetext

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