Thin Coalgebraic Behaviours Are Inductive

Abstract

Coalgebras for analytic functors uniformly model graph-like systems where the successors of a state may admit certain symmetries. Examples of successor structure include ordered tuples, cyclic lists and multisets. Motivated by goals in automata-based verification and results on thin trees, we introduce thin coalgebras as those coalgebras with only countably many infinite paths from each state. Our main result is an inductive characterisation of thinness via an initial algebra. To this end, we develop a syntax for thin behaviours and capture with a single equation when two terms represent the same thin behaviour. Finally, for the special case of polynomial functors, we retrieve from our syntax the notion of Cantor-Bendixson rank of a thin tree.