Hoeffding-ANOVA decompositions for symmetric statistics of exchangeable observations

The tails of the distribution of a mean zero, variance $\sigma^2$ random variable $Y$ satisfy concentration of measure inequalities of the form $\mathbb{P}(Y \ge t) \le \exp(-B(t))$ for $$ B(t)=\frac{t^2}{2( \sigma^2 + ct)} \quad \mbox{for $t \ge 0$, and} \quad B(t)=\frac{t}{c}\left( \log t - \log \log t - \frac{\sigma^2}{c}\right) \quad \mbox{for $t>e$} $$ whenever there exists a zero biased coupling of $Y$ bounded by $c$, under suitable conditions on the existence of the mo...

We are interested in the behavior of particular functionals, in a framework where the only source of randomness is a sampling without replacement. More precisely the aim of this short note is to prove an exponential concentration inequality for special U-statistics of order 2, that can be seen as chaos.

In a celebrated work by Hoeffding [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 58 (1963) 13-30], several inequalities for tail probabilities of sums M_n=X_1+... +X_n of bounded independent random variables X_j were proved. These inequalities had a considerable impact on the development of probability and statistics, and remained unimproved until 1995 when Talagrand [Inst. Hautes Etudes Sci. Publ. Math. 81 (1995a) 73-205] inserted certain missing factors in the bounds of two theorems. By similar...

In this paper, we study self-normalized moderate deviations for degenerate { $U$}-statistics of order $2$. Let $\{X_i, i \geq 1\}$ be i.i.d. random variables and consider symmetric and degenerate kernel functions in the form $h(x,y)=\sum_{l=1}^{\infty} \lambda_l g_l (x) g_l(y)$, where $\lambda_l > 0$, $E g_l(X_1)=0$, and $g_l (X_1)$ is in the domain of attraction of a normal law for all $l \geq 1$. Under the condition $\sum_{l=1}^{\infty}\lambda_l<\infty$ and some truncated c...

We present results concerning when the joint distribution of an exchangeable sequence is determined by the marginal distributions of its partial sums. The question of whether or not this determination occurs was posed by David Aldous. We then consider related uniqueness problems, including a continuous time analog to the Aldous problem and a randomized univariate moment problem.

Test statistics which are invariant under various subgroups of the orthogonal group are shown to provide tests whose powers are asymptotically equal to their level against the usual type of contiguous alternative in models where the number of parameters is allowed to grow as the sample size increases. The result is applied to the usual analysis of variance test in the Neyman-Scott many means problem and to an analogous problem in exponential families. Proofs are based on a me...

In this paper the following result, which allows one to decouple U-Statistics in tail probability, is proved in full generality. Theorem 1. Let $X_i$ be a sequence of independent random variables taking values in a measure space $S$, and let $f_{i_1...i_k}$ be measurable functions from $S^k$ to a Banach space $B$. Let $(X_i^{(j)})$ be independent copies of $(X_i)$. The following inequality holds for all $t \ge 0$ and all $n\ge 2$, $$ P(||\sum_{1\le i_1 \ne ... \ne i_k \le n...

Incomplete U-statistics have been proposed to accelerate computation. They use only a subset of the subsamples required for kernel evaluations by complete U-statistics. This paper gives a finite sample bound in the style of Bernstein's inequality. Applied to complete U-statistics the resulting inequality improves over the bounds of both Hoeffding and Arcones. For randomly determined subsamples it is shown, that, as soon as the their number reaches the square of the sample-siz...

We survey known solutions to the infinite extendibility problem for (necessarily exchangeable) probability laws on $\mathbb{R}^d$, which is: Can a given random vector $\vec{X} = (X_1,\ldots,X_d)$ be represented in distribution as the first $d$ members of an infinite exchangeable sequence of random variables? This is the case if and only if $\vec{X}$ has a stochastic representation that is "conditionally iid" according to the seminal de Finetti's Theorem. Of particular interes...

A weighted U-statistic based on a random sample X_1,...,X_n has the form U_n=\sum_{1\le i,j\le n}w_{i-j}K(X_i,X_j), where K is a fixed symmetric measurable function and the w_i are symmetric weights. A large class of statistics can be expressed as weighted U-statistics or variations thereof. This paper establishes the asymptotic normality of U_n when the sample observations come from a nonlinear time series and linear processes.