A law of the iterated logarithm for small counts in Karlin’s occupancy scheme

Abstract

In the Karlin infinite occupancy scheme, balls are thrown independently into an infinite array of boxes $1,2,\dots $ , with probability ${p_{k}}$ of hitting the box k. For $j,n\in \mathbb{N}$, denote by ${\mathcal{K}_{j}^{\ast }}(n)$ the number of boxes containing exactly j balls provided that n balls have been thrown. Small counts are the variables ${\mathcal{K}_{j}^{\ast }}(n)$, with j fixed. The main result is a law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) for the small counts as the number of balls thrown becomes large. Its proof exploits a Poissonization technique and is based on a new LIL for infinite sums of independent indicators ${\textstyle\sum _{k\ge 1}}{1_{{A_{k}}(t)}}$ as $t\to \infty $, where the family of events ${({A_{k}}(t))_{t\ge 0}}$ is not necessarily monotone in t. The latter LIL is an extension of a LIL obtained recently by Buraczewski, Iksanov and Kotelnikova (2023+) in the situation when ${({A_{k}}(t))_{t\ge 0}}$ forms a nondecreasing family of events.