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A Constructive Proof of the Glivenko-Cantelli Theorem

Probability 2021-10-27 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

The Glivenko-Cantelli theorem states that the empirical distribution function converges uniformly almost surely to the theoretical distribution for a random variable XRX \in \mathbb{R}. This is an important result because it establishes the fact that sampling does capture the dispersion measure the distribution function FF imposes. In essence, sampling permits one to learn and infer the behavior of FF by only looking at observations from XX. The probabilities that are inferred from samples X\mathbf{X} will become more precise as the sample size increases and more data becomes available. Therefore, it is valid to study distributions via samples. The proof present here is constructive, meaning that the result is derived directly from the fact that the empirical distribution function converges pointwise almost surely to the theoretical distribution. The work includes a proof of this preliminary statement and attempts to motivate the intuition one gets from sampling techniques when studying the regions in which a model concentrates probability. The sets where dispersion is described with precision by the empirical distribution function will eventually cover the entire sample space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.13236,
  title  = {A Constructive Proof of the Glivenko-Cantelli Theorem},
  author = {Daniel Salnikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.13236},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

8 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:10:41.629Z