English

On the tightness of Gaussian concentration for convex functions

Probability 2017-06-30 v1 Functional Analysis

Abstract

The concentration of measure phenomenon in Gauss' space states that every LL-Lipschitz map ff on Rn\mathbb R^n satisfies γn({x:f(x)Mft})2et22L2,t>0, \gamma_{n} \left(\{ x : | f(x) - M_{f} | \geqslant t \} \right) \leqslant 2 e^{ - \frac{t^2}{ 2L^2} }, \quad t>0, where γn\gamma_{n} is the standard Gaussian measure on Rn\mathbb R^{n} and MfM_{f} is a median of ff. In this work, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when this inequality can be reversed, up to universal constants, in the case when ff is additionally assumed to be convex. In particular, we show that if the variance Var(f){\rm Var}(f) (with respect to γn\gamma_{n}) satisfies αLVar(f) \alpha L \leqslant \sqrt{ {\rm Var}(f) } for some 0<α1 0<\alpha \leqslant 1, then γn({x:f(x)Mft})ceCt2L2,t>0, \gamma_{n} \left(\{ x : | f(x) - M_{f} | \geqslant t \}\right) \geqslant c e^{ -C \frac{t^2}{ L^2} } , \quad t>0 , where c,C>0c,C>0 are constants depending only on α\alpha.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.09446,
  title  = {On the tightness of Gaussian concentration for convex functions},
  author = {Petros Valettas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.09446},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

14 pages; preliminary version