Classification complexity of homeomorphism group actions

Abstract

In this paper, we study how the classification complexity of natural orbit equivalence relations changes when the full homeomorphism group of a compact metrizable space is replaced by a dense non-closed subgroup. For a compact space $X$ and a subgroup $G \leq \mathcal{H}(X)$, we consider three canonical actions: the left shift action on $\mathcal{H}(X)$, the induced hyperspace action on $\mathcal{F}(X)$, and the conjugation action on $G$ We first analyze subgroups of the group $\mathcal{H}^+([0,1])$ of increasing interval homeomorphisms, focusing on bi-Lipschitz homeomorphisms, diffeomorphisms, and bi-absolutely continuous homeomorphisms. We show that, in contrast to the behavior of closed subgroups, passing to these subgroups strictly increases the complexities of the associated classification problems or makes them incomparable with the corresponding full-group relations. In the second part, we investigate hyperspace actions of bi-absolutely continuous homeomorphisms on the Cantor space and the Hilbert cube with respect to some Borel probability measure and show that a similar behavior occurs on these spaces as well.