English

An improvement of the Boppana-Holzman bound for Rademacher random variables

Combinatorics 2021-01-29 v2

Abstract

Let v1,v2,...,vnv_1,v_2,...,v_n be real numbers whose squares add up to 11. Consider the 2n2^n signed sums of the form S=i=1n±vi.S=\sum_{i=1}^n \pm v_i. Holzman and Kleitman (1992) proved that at least 38=0.375\frac38=0.375 of these sums satisfy S1.|S|\leq 1. By using bounds for appropriate moments of S,S, Boppana and Holzman (2017) were able to improve the bound to 1332=0.40625\frac{13}{32}=0.40625 and even a bit better to 1332+9×106.\frac{13}{32}+9\times10^{-6}. By following their approach, but using a key result of Bentkus and Dzindzalieta (2015), we will drastically improve (by more than 5\%) the latter barrier 1332\frac{13}{32} to 12Φ(2)4Φ(2)0.42768.\frac{1}{2}-\frac{\Phi(-2)}{4\Phi(-\sqrt{2})}\approx 0.42768.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.02588,
  title  = {An improvement of the Boppana-Holzman bound for Rademacher random variables},
  author = {Harrie Hendriks and Martien C. A. van Zuijlen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.02588},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Corrected Lemma 2 and the statement of Corollary 3