Continuity of sub-additive topological pressure with matrix cocycles *

Let A = {A 1, A 2, …, A k } be a finite collection of contracting affine maps, the corresponding pressure function P(A, s) plays the fundamental role in the study of dimension of self-affine sets. The zero of the pressure function always give the upper bound of the dimension of a self-affine set, and is exactly the dimension of ‘typical’ self-affine sets. In this paper, we consider an expanding base dynamical system, and establish the continuity of the pressure with the singular value function of a Hölder continuous matrix cocycle. This extends Feng and Shmerkin’s result in (Feng and Shmerkin 2014 Geom. Funct. Anal. 24 1101–1128) to a general setting.