Entropy-Variance Curves of Binary Sequences Generated by Random Substitutions of Constant Length

Abstract

We study some properties of binary sequences generated by random substitutions of constant length. Specifically, assuming the alphabet {0,1}, we consider the following asymmetric substitution rule of length k: 0→⟨0,0,…,0⟩ and 1→⟨Y1,Y2,…,Yk⟩, where Yi is a Bernoulli random variable with parameter p∈[0,1]. We obtain by recurrence the discrete probability distribution of the stochastic variable that counts the number of ones in the sequence formed after a number i of substitutions (iterations). We derive its first two statistical moments, mean and variance, and the entropy of the generated sequences as a function of the substitution length k for any successive iteration i, and characterize the values of p where the maxima of these measures occur. Finally, we obtain the parametric curves entropy-variance for each iteration and substitution length. We find two regimes of dependence between these two variables that, to our knowledge, have not been previously described. Besides, it allows to compare sequences with the same entropy but different variance and vice versa.