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Universal Convergence of Semimeasures on Individual Random Sequences

Hutter, Marcus; Muchnik, Andrej

Description

Solomonoff’s central result on induction is that the posterior of a universal semimeasure M converges rapidly and with probability 1 to the true sequence generating posterior μ, if the latter is computable. Hence, M is eligible as a universal sequence predictor in case of unknown μ. Despite some nearby results and proofs in the literature, the stronger result of convergence for all (Martin-Löf) random sequences remained open. Such a convergence result would be particularly interesting and...[Show more]

dc.contributor.authorHutter, Marcus
dc.contributor.authorMuchnik, Andrej
dc.date.accessioned2015-09-01T05:37:58Z
dc.date.available2015-09-01T05:37:58Z
dc.identifier.isbn978-3-540-23356-5
dc.identifier.issn0302-9743
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1885/15054
dc.description.abstractSolomonoff’s central result on induction is that the posterior of a universal semimeasure M converges rapidly and with probability 1 to the true sequence generating posterior μ, if the latter is computable. Hence, M is eligible as a universal sequence predictor in case of unknown μ. Despite some nearby results and proofs in the literature, the stronger result of convergence for all (Martin-Löf) random sequences remained open. Such a convergence result would be particularly interesting and natural, since randomness can be defined in terms of M itself. We show that there are universal semimeasures M which do not converge for all random sequences, i.e. we give a partial negative answer to the open problem. We also provide a positive answer for some non-universal semimeasures. We define the incomputable measure D as a mixture over all computable measures and the enumerable semimeasure W as a mixture over all enumerable nearly-measures. We show that W converges to D and D to μ on all random sequences. The Hellinger distance measuring closeness of two distributions plays a central role.
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work was partially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF grant 2100-67712.02) and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR grants N04-01-00427 and N02-01-22001).
dc.publisherSpringer Verlag
dc.relation.ispartofAlgorithmic Learning Theory: 15th International Conference, ALT 2004, Padova, Italy, October 2-5, 2004. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence)
dc.rights© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0302-9743/..."Author's post-print on any open access repository after 12 months after publication" from SHERPA/RoMEO site (as at 1/09/15).
dc.subjectSequence prediction
dc.subjectAlgorithmic Information Theory
dc.subjectuniversal enumerable semimeasure
dc.subjectmixture distributions
dc.subjectposterior convergence
dc.titleUniversal Convergence of Semimeasures on Individual Random Sequences
dc.typeConference paper
local.identifier.citationvolume3244
dc.date.issued2004
local.publisher.urlhttp://link.springer.com/
local.type.statusAccepted Version
local.contributor.affiliationHutter, M., Research School of Computer Science, The Australian National University
local.bibliographicCitation.startpage234
local.bibliographicCitation.lastpage248
local.identifier.doi10.1007/978-3-540-30215-5_19
CollectionsANU Research Publications

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