Persistence of spectral projections for stochastic operators on large tensor products

It is proved that for families of stochastic operators on a countable tensor product, depending smoothly on parameters, any spectral projection persists smoothly, where smoothness is defined using norms based on ideas of Dobrushin. A rigorous perturbation theory for families of stochastic operators with spectral gap is thereby created. It is illustrated by deriving an effective slow two-state dynamics for a three-state probabilistic cellular automaton.