Boolean Cumulants and Exact Reduced Descriptions of Renewal-Driven Systems

Abstract

Reduced descriptions of unresolved fluctuations are commonly based on Gaussian processes, although many realistic forcings have finite correlation times and a renewal structure. For memoryless step (Kubo--Anderson) noise, we show that the reduced dynamics admit two exact and complementary descriptions: a kernel representation governed by the Boolean cumulants of the jump distribution, and a frozen-noise representation adapted to stationary probability densities. For exponentially distributed waiting times, the totally time-ordered $G$-cumulants coincide with the Boolean cumulants of the jump law, and the memory kernel is resummed exactly as the Boolean generator $η$ evaluated on a resolvent operator. Second-order closure is exact if and only if the jump law is symmetric Bernoulli; otherwise, the leading closure error is controlled by $(b_4/b_2)λ^2$. The Boolean hierarchy, however, acts on the kernel, not on the stationary measure. Stationary densities are approximated by replacing the jump law with its $N$-point Gauss quadrature: each surrogate preserves all multi-time correlations up to order $2N-1$ for any waiting-time law, its kernel is a Padé resummation of the Boolean one, and it is itself an exactly solvable renewal problem. For the linear system with linear multiplicative interaction (LIMI/CAM), the frozen-noise representation reduces the dynamics to a random affine recursion and yields exact support boundaries, singularity exponents and Kesten tail indices, confirmed numerically. Rates, moments and closure errors are governed by the Boolean hierarchy, whereas stationary densities are determined by the geometry of the jump distribution. For memoryless renewal noise, the combinatorial structure controlling finite-correlation reductions is Boolean.