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Catoni-style Confidence Sequences under Infinite Variance

Statistics Theory 2022-08-08 v1 Machine Learning Machine Learning Statistics Theory

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an extension of confidence sequences for settings where the variance of the data-generating distribution does not exist or is infinite. Confidence sequences furnish confidence intervals that are valid at arbitrary data-dependent stopping times, naturally having a wide range of applications. We first establish a lower bound for the width of the Catoni-style confidence sequences for the finite variance case to highlight the looseness of the existing results. Next, we derive tight Catoni-style confidence sequences for data distributions having a relaxed bounded~pthp^{th}-moment, where~p(1,2]p \in (1,2], and strengthen the results for the finite variance case of~p=2p =2. The derived results are shown to better than confidence sequences obtained using Dubins-Savage inequality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.03185,
  title  = {Catoni-style Confidence Sequences under Infinite Variance},
  author = {Sujay Bhatt and Guanhua Fang and Ping Li and Gennady Samorodnitsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.03185},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:30:45.584Z