In probability theory, Kolmogorov's zero–one law, named in honor of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, specifies that a certain type of event, called a tail event, will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen; that is, the probability of such an event occurring is zero or one.
Contents
Tail events are defined in terms of infinite sequences of random variables. Suppose
is an infinite sequence of independent random variables (not necessarily identically distributed). Let
In many situations, it can be easy to apply Kolmogorov's zero–one law to show that some event has probability 0 or 1, but surprisingly hard to determine which of these two extreme values is the correct one.
Formulation
A more general statement of Kolmogorov's zero–one law holds for sequences of independent σ-algebras. Let (Ω,F,P) be a probability space and let Fn be a sequence of mutually independent σ-algebras contained in F. Let
be the smallest σ-algebra containing Fn, Fn+1, …. Then Kolmogorov's zero–one law asserts that for any event
one has either P(F) = 0 or 1.
The statement of the law in terms of random variables is obtained from the latter by taking each Fn to be the σ-algebra generated by the random variable Xn. A tail event is then by definition an event which is measurable with respect to the σ-algebra generated by all Xn, but which is independent of any finite number of Xn. That is, a tail event is precisely an element of the intersection
Examples
An invertible measure-preserving transformation on a standard probability space that obeys the 0-1 law is called a Kolmogorov automorphism. All Bernoulli automorphisms are Kolmogorov automorphisms but not vice versa.