English

An extremal property of the normal distribution, with a discrete analog

Probability 2019-05-09 v1

Abstract

We prove, using the Brascamp-Lieb inequality, that the Gaussian measure is the only strong log-concave measure having a strong log-concavity parameter equal to its covariance matrix. We also give a similar characterization of the Poisson measure in the discrete case, using "Chebyshev's other inequality". We briefly discuss how these results relate to Stein and Stein-Chen methods for Gaussian and Poisson approximation, and to the Bakry-Emery calculus.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1806.05577,
  title  = {An extremal property of the normal distribution, with a discrete analog},
  author = {Erwan Hillion and Oliver Johnson and Adrien Saumard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.05577},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages