Related papers: Improved Hoeffding's Lemma and Hoeffding's Tail Bo…

A tail empirical process for heavy-tailed and right-censored data is introduced and its Gaussian approximation is established. In this context, a (weighted) new Hill-type estimator for positive extreme value index is proposed and its…

A refinement of Bennett's inequality is introduced which is strictly tighter than the classical bound. The new bound establishes the convergence of the average of independent random variables to its expected value. It also carefully…

The present paper is a sequel to and generalization of Fung and Seneta (2016) whose main result gives the asymptotic behaviour as $ u \to 0^{+}$ of $\lambda_L(u) = P(X_1 \leq F_1^{-1}(u) | X_2 \leq F_2^{-1}(u)),$ when $\bf{X} \sim…

In this paper we investigate potential changes which may have occurred over the last two decades in the probability mass of the right tail of the wage distribution, through the analysis of the corresponding tail index. In specific, a…

Hoeffding's inequality is a fundamental tool widely applied in probability theory, statistics, and machine learning. In this paper, we establish Hoeffding's inequalities specifically tailored for an irreducible and positive recurrent…

Let $\{X_t, t \geq 1\}$ be a sequence of identically distributed and pairwise asymptotically independent random variables with regularly varying tails and $\{ \Theta_t, t\geq1 \}$ be a sequence of positive random variables independent of…

We analyze the stationary tail of a fixed-point equation arising in branching processes with state-independent immigration, when both immigration and offspring distributions have heavy tails with boundary index one. We prove that \[ P(X >…

We develop an efficient simulation algorithm for computing the tail probabilities of the infinite series $S = \sum_{n \geq 1} a_n X_n$ when random variables $X_n$ are heavy-tailed. As $S$ is the sum of infinitely many random variables, any…

Consider $n$ real/complex, independent/dependent random variables with respective tail bounds and $g$ a measurable function of the r.v.'s. Consider $f$ the "sharpest" tail bound of $g$ (sharpest in the sense that if $f$ were any less, then…

We investigate the properties of a discrete-time martingale $\{X_m\}_{m\in \mathbb Z_{\geq 0}}$, where all differences between adjacent random variables are limited to be not more than a constant as a promise. In this situation, it is known…

A random variable $\xi$ has a {\it light-tailed} distribution (for short: is light-tailed) if it possesses a finite exponential moment, $\E \exp (\lambda \xi) <\infty$ for some $\lambda >0$, and has a {\it heavy-tailed} distribution (is…

We consider a random variable X satisfying almost-sure conditions involving G:=<DX,-DL^{-1}X> where DX is X's Malliavin derivative and L^{-1} is the inverse Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator. A lower- (resp. upper-) bound condition on G is proved…

A current strand of research in high-dimensional statistics deals with robustifying the available methodology with respect to deviations from the pervasive light-tail assumptions. In this paper we consider a linear mean regression model…

The best arm identification problem requires identifying the best alternative (i.e., arm) in active experimentation using the smallest number of experiments (i.e., arm pulls), which is crucial for cost-efficient and timely decision-making…

Historically, to bound the mean for small sample sizes, practitioners have had to choose between using methods with unrealistic assumptions about the unknown distribution (e.g., Gaussianity) and methods like Hoeffding's inequality that use…

Let $X_{1},\ldots ,X_{n}$ be $n$ real-valued dependent random variables. With motivation from Mitra and Resnick (2009), we derive the tail asymptotic expansion for the weighted sum of order statistics $X_{1:n}\leq \cdots \leq X_{n:n}$ of…

We study generalisations of a simple, combinatorial proof of a Chernoff bound similar to the one by Impagliazzo and Kabanets (RANDOM, 2010). In particular, we prove a randomized version of the hitting property of expander random walks and…

Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be independent nonnegative random variables (r.v.'s), with $S_n:=X_1+\dots+X_n$ and finite values of $s_i:=E X_i^2$ and $m_i:=E X_i>0$. Exact upper bounds on $E f(S_n)$ for all functions $f$ in a certain class…

The Markov, Chebyshev, and Chernoff inequalities are some of the most widely used methods for bounding the tail probabilities of random variables. In all three cases, the bounds are tight in the sense that there exists easy examples where…

We study the almost surely finite random variable $S$ defined by the distributional fixed-point equation \[ S \stackrel{d}{=} 1 + \max\{US', (1-U)S''\}, \qquad U \sim \mathrm{Unif}(0,1), \] where $S'$ and $S''$ are independent copies of…