Measurable events indexed by trees

Abstract

A tree $T$ is said to be homogeneous if it is uniquely rooted and there exists an integer $b\ge 2$, called the branching number of $T$, such that every $t\in T$ has exactly $b$ immediate successors. We study the behavior of measurable events in probability spaces indexed by homogeneous trees. Precisely, we show that for every integer $b\ge 2$ and every integer $n\ge 1$ there exists an integer $q(b,n)$ with the following property. If $T$ is a homogeneous tree with branching number $b$ and $\{A_t:t\in T\}$ is a family of measurable events in a probability space $(\Omega ,\Sigma ,\mu )$ satisfying $\mu (A_t)\ge \epsilon >0$ for every $t\in T$, then for every $0<\theta <\epsilon$ there exists a strong subtree $S$ of $T$ of infinite height such that for every non-empty finite subset $F$ of $S$ of cardinality $n$ we have \[ μ\Big(\bigcap_{t\in F} A_t\Big) \meg θ^{q(b,n)}. \] In fact, we can take $q(b,n)=((2^b-1{)}^{2n-1}-1)\cdot (2^b-2{)}^{-1}$. A finite version of this result is also obtained.

37 pages