Limit theorems for von Mises statistics of a measure preserving transformation
For a measure preserving transformation $T$ of a probability space $(X,\mathcal F,μ)$ we investigate almost sure and distributional convergence of random variables of the form $$x \to \frac{1}{C_n} \sum_{i_1<n,...,i_d<n} f(T^{i_1}x,...,T^{i_d}x),\, n=1,2,..., $$ where $f$ (called the \emph{kernel}) is a function from $X^d$ to $\R$ and $C_1, C_2,...$ are appropriate normalizing constants. We observe that the above random variables are well defined and belong to $L_r(μ)$ provided that the kernel is chosen from the projective tensor product $$L_p(X_1,\mathcal F_1, μ_1) \otimes_π...\otimes_π L_p(X_d,\mathcal F_d, μ_d)\subset L_p(μ^d)$$ with $p=d\,r,\, r\ \in [1, \infty).$ We establish a form of the individual ergodic theorem for such sequences. Next, we give a martingale approximation argument to derive a central limit theorem in the non-degenerate case (in the sense of the classical Hoeffding's decomposition). Furthermore, for $d=2$ and a wide class of canonical kernels $f$ we also show that the convergence holds in distribution towards a quadratic form $\sum_{m=1}^{\infty} λ_mη^2_m$ in independent standard Gaussian variables $η_1, η_2,...$. Our results on the distributional convergence use a $T$--\,invariant filtration as a prerequisite and are derived from uni- and multivariate martingale approximations.