The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers
Abstract
The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed while increasing the number of outcomes (M) available to a discrete random variable. We establish sufficient conditions for the variance of the sample mean to increase monotonically with the number of outcomes, such that the sample mean ``diverges'' from the population mean, acting like an ``reverse'' to the law of large numbers. These results, we believe, are relevant to many situations which require sampling of statistics of certain finite discrete random variables.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0803.3913,
title = {The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers},
author = {Kieran Kelly and Przemyslaw Repetowicz and Seosamh macReamoinn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.3913},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
27 pages, 8 figures, paper submitted to journal "Probability Theory and Related Fields"