Finite Partially Exchangeable Laws are Signed Mixtures of Product Laws

Given a partition {I1, …, Ik} of {1, …, n}, let (X1, …, Xn) be random vector with each Xi taking values in an arbitrary measurable space (S, S) such that their joint law is invariant under finite permutations of the indexes within each class Ij. Then, it is shown that this law has to be a signed mixture of independent laws and identically distributed within each class Ij. We provide a necessary condition for the existence of a nonnegative directing measure. This is related to the notions of infinite extendibility and reinforcement. In particular, given a finite exchangeable sequence of Bernoulli random variables, the directing measure can be chosen nonnegative if and only if two effectively computable matrices are positive semi-definite.