Alec's sample mean bound

From Maths
Jump to: navigation, search
Stub grade: A*
This page is a stub
This page is a stub, so it contains little or minimal information and is on a to-do list for being expanded.The message provided is:
Needs some work, like what is a random variable for which expectation and variance are defined? Can we have complex or vector ones for example?

Notice

It appears that this is actually 3 inequalities in one, which we shall name as follows:

  1. Alec's remaining probability bound - that for X a real and non-negative random variable, αR>0[P[Xα]E[X]α]
  2. Alec's deviation probability bound - that for a real random variable (possibly negative) X that βR>0[P[|XE[X]|β]Var(X)β2]
  3. Alec's sample mean bound (this page)

Inequality

Let X1,,Xn be a collection of n random variables which are pairwise independent, such that:

  • μi{1,,n}[E[Xi]=μ] - all of the Xi have the same expectation and
    • Alternatively: i,j{1,,n}[E[Xi]=E[Xj]], but note we need μ in the expression
  • σi{1,,n}[Var(Xi)=σ2] - all the Xi have the same variance
    • Alternatively: i,j{1,,n}[Var(Xi)=Var(Xj)], but note again we need σ in the expression

Then

  • For all ϵ>0 we have:
    • P[|ni=1Xinμ|<ϵ]1σ2ϵ2n
      • Note that the notation here differs from that in my 2011 research journal slightly, but σ and μ were present.
    • P[|ni=1Xinμ|<ϵ]1σ2ϵ2n

History of form

When I "discovered" this inequality I was looking to say something like "the chance of the sample mean being within so much of the mean is at least ..."

I didn't know how to handle |XE[X]| (what we'd now call Mdm(X)) which is why I applied it to variance, and of course (XE[X])20 - the only condition required for the first inequality.