A note on sums of independent random variables

This paper is part of series on self-contained papers in which a large part, if not the full extent, of the asymptotic limit theory of summands of independent random variables is exposed. Each paper of the series may be taken as review exposition but specially as a complete exposition expect a few exterior resources. For graduate students and for researchers (beginners or advanced), any paper of the series should be considered as a basis for constructing new results. The cont...

Linear combinations of independent random variables have been extensively studied in the literature. However, most of the work is based on some specific distribution assumptions. In this paper, a companion of (J. Appl. Probab. 48 (2011) 1179-1188), we unify the study of linear combinations of independent nonnegative random variables under the general setup by using some monotone transforms. The results are further generalized to the case of independent but not necessarily ide...

This paper develops sharp bounds on moments of sums of k-wise independent bounded random variables, under constrained average variance. The result closes the problem addressed in part in the previous works of Schmidt et al. and Bellare, Rompel. We The work also discuss discusses other applications of independent interests, such as asymptotically sharp bounds on binomial moments.

This paper presents new probability inequalities for sums of independent, random, self-adjoint matrices. These results place simple and easily verifiable hypotheses on the summands, and they deliver strong conclusions about the large-deviation behavior of the maximum eigenvalue of the sum. Tail bounds for the norm of a sum of random rectangular matrices follow as an immediate corollary. The proof techniques also yield some information about matrix-valued martingales. In oth...

We obtain concentration and large deviation for the sums of independent and identically distributed random variables with heavy-tailed distributions. Our concentration results are concerned with random variables whose distributions satisfy $\mathbb{P}(X>t) \leq {\rm e}^{- I(t)}$, where $I: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is an increasing function and $I(t)/t \rightarrow \alpha \in [0, \infty)$ as $t \rightarrow \infty$. Our main theorem can not only recover some of the exi...

We show sharp bounds for probabilities of large deviations for sums of independent random variables satisfying Bernstein's condition. One such bound is very close to the tail of the standard Gaussian law in certain case; other bounds improve the inequalities of Bennett and Hoeffding by adding missing factors in the spirit of Talagrand (1995). We also complete Talagrand's inequality by giving a lower bound of the same form, leading to an equality. As a consequence, we obtain l...

In this paper, we prove a conditional limit theorem for independent not necessarily identically distributed random variables. Namely, we obtain the asymptotic distribution of a large number of them given the sum.

We prove that the tail probabilities of sums of independent uniform random variables, up to a multiplicative constant, are dominated by the Gaussian tail with matching variance and find the sharp constant for such stochastic domination.

In this paper, we develop a general machinery for finding explicit uniform probability and moment bounds on sub-additive positive functionals of random processes. Using the developed general technique, we derive uniform bounds on the ${\mathbb{L}}_s$-norms of empirical and regression-type processes. Usefulness of the obtained results is illustrated by application to the processes appearing in kernel density estimation and in nonparametric estimation of regression functions.

A well-known discovery of Feige's is the following: Let $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ be nonnegative independent random variables, with $\mathbb{E}[X_i] \leq 1 \;\forall i$, and let $X = \sum_{i=1}^n X_i$. Then for any $n$, \[\Pr[X < \mathbb{E}[X] + 1] \geq \alpha > 0,\] for some $\alpha \geq 1/13$. This bound was later improved to $1/8$ by He, Zhang, and Zhang. By a finer consideration of the first four moments, we further improve the bound to approximately $.14$. The conjectured true ...