Flows on measurable spaces

Abstract

AbstractThe theory of graph limits is only understood to a somewhat satisfactory degree in the cases of dense graphs and of bounded degree graphs. There is, however, a lot of interest in the intermediate cases. It appears that one of the most important constituents of graph limits in the general case will be Markov spaces (Markov chains on measurable spaces with a stationary distribution). This motivates our goal to extend some important theorems from finite graphs to Markov spaces or, more generally, to measurable spaces. In this paper, we show that much of flow theory, one of the most important areas in graph theory, can be extended to measurable spaces. Surprisingly, even the Markov space structure is not fully needed to get these results: all we need a standard Borel space with a measure on its square (generalizing the finite node set and the counting measure on the edge set). Our results may be considered as extensions of flow theory for directed graphs to the measurable case.