A study of counts of Bernoulli strings via conditional Poisson processes

Abstract

A sequence of random variables, each taking values 0 0 or 1 1 , is called a Bernoulli sequence. We say that a string of length d d occurs in a Bernoulli sequence if a success is followed by exactly ( d − 1 ) (d-1) failures before the next success. The counts of such d d -strings are of interest, and in specific independent Bernoulli sequences are known to correspond to asymptotic d d -cycle counts in random permutations.

In this paper, we give a new framework, in terms of conditional Poisson processes, which allows for a quick characterization of the joint distribution of the counts of all d d -strings, in a general class of Bernoulli sequences, as certain mixtures of the product of Poisson measures. In particular, this general class includes all Bernoulli sequences considered in the literature, as well as a host of new sequences.