English

Log-concavity and strong log-concavity: a review

Statistics Theory 2014-04-24 v1 Statistics Theory

Abstract

We review and formulate results concerning log-concavity and strong-log-concavity in both discrete and continuous settings. We show how preservation of log-concavity and strongly log-concavity on R\mathbb{R} under convolution follows from a fundamental monotonicity result of Efron (1969). We provide a new proof of Efron's theorem using the recent asymmetric Brascamp-Lieb inequality due to Otto and Menz (2013). Along the way we review connections between log-concavity and other areas of mathematics and statistics, including concentration of measure, log-Sobolev inequalities, convex geometry, MCMC algorithms, Laplace approximations, and machine learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.5886,
  title  = {Log-concavity and strong log-concavity: a review},
  author = {Adrien Saumard and Jon A. Wellner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.5886},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

67 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:57:08.561Z