We study how well moments of sums of independent symmetric random variables with logarithmically concave tails may be approximated by moments of Gaussian random variables.
We show that a measure on the real line that is the image of a log-concave measure under a polynomial of degree $d$ possesses a density from the Nikol'skii--Besov class of fractional order $1/d$. This result is used to prove an estimate of the total variation distance between such measures in terms of the Fortet--Mourier distance.
We derive two-sided estimates for random multilinear forms (random chaoses) generated by independent symmetric random variables with logarithmically concave tails. Estimates are exact up to multiplicative constants depending only on the order of chaos.
We study two topologies $τ_{KR}$ and $τ_K$ on the space of measures on a completely regular space generated by Kantorovich--Rubinshtein and Kantorovich seminorms analogous to their classical norms in the case of a metric space. The Kantorovich--Rubinshtein topology $τ_{KR}$ coincides with the weak topology on nonnegative measures and on bounded uniformly tight sets of measures. A~sufficient condition is given for the compactness in the Kantorovich topology. We show that for logarithmically concave measures and stable measures weak convergence implies convergence in the Kantorovich topology. We…
The paper provides an estimate of the total variation distance between distributions of polynomials defined on a space equipped with a logarithmically concave measure in terms of the $L^2$-distance between these polynomials.
Under correlation-type conditions, we derive an upper bound of order $(\log n)/n$ for the average Kolmogorov distance between the distributions of weighted sums of dependent summands and the normal law. The result is based on improved concentration inequalities on high-dimensional Euclidean spheres. Applications are illustrated on the example of log-concave probability measures.
Let $C$ and $K$ be centrally symmetric convex bodies of volume $1$ in ${\mathbb R}^n$. We provide upper bounds for the multi-integral expression \begin{equation*}\|{\bf t}\|_{C^s,K}=\int_{C}\cdots\int_{C}\Big\|\sum_{j=1}^st_jx_j\Big\|_K\,dx_1\cdots dx_s\end{equation*} in the case where $C$ is isotropic. Our approach provides an alternative proof of the sharp lower bound, due to Gluskin and V. Milman, for this quantity. We also present some applications to "randomized" vector balancing problems.
We establish two-sided bounds for expectations of order statistics ($k$-th maxima) of moduli of coordinates of centered log-concave random vectors with uncorrelated coordinates. Our bounds are exact up to multiplicative universal constants in the unconditional case for all $k$ and in the isotropic case for $k \leq n-cn^{5/6}$. We also derive two-sided estimates for expectations of sums of $k$ largest moduli of coordinates for some classes of random vectors.
For every given real value of the ratio $μ:=A_X/G_X>1$ of the arithmetic and geometric means of a positive random variable $X$ and every real $v>0$, exact upper bounds on the right- and left-tail probabilities $\mathsf{P}(X/G_X\ge v)$ and $\mathsf{P}(X/G_X\le v)$ are obtained, in terms of $μ$ and $v$. In particular, these bounds imply that $X/G_X\to1$ in probability as $A_X/G_X\downarrow1$. Such a result may be viewed as a converse to a reverse Jensen inequality for the strictly concave function $f=\ln$, whereas the well-known Cantelli and Chebyshev inequalities may be viewed as converses to a…
This article investigates sharp comparison of moments for various classes of random variables appearing in a geometric context. In the first part of our work we find the optimal constants in the Khintchine inequality for random vectors uniformly distributed on the unit ball of the space $\ell_q^n$ for $q\in(2,\infty)$, complementing past works that treated $q\in(0,2]\cup\{\infty\}$. As a byproduct of this result, we prove an extremal property for weighted sums of symmetric uniform distributions among all symmetric unimodal distributions. In the second part we provide a one-to-one correspondenc…
We consider the deviation inequalities for the sums of independent $d$ by $d$ random matrices, as well as rank one random tensors. Our focus is on the non-isotropic case and the bounds that do not depend explicitly on the dimension $d$, but rather on the effective rank. In an elementary and unified manner, we show the following results: 1) A deviation bound for the sums of independent positive-semi-definite matrices. This result complements the dimension-free bound of Koltchinskii and Lounici [Bernoulli, 2017] on the sample covariance matrix in the sub-Gaussian case. 2) A new bound for truncat…
We initiate the study of the Stam region, defined as the subset of the positive orthant in $\mathbb{R}^{2^n-1}$ that arises from considering entropy powers of subset sums of $n$ independent random vectors in a Euclidean space of finite dimension. We show that the class of fractionally superadditive set functions provides an outer bound to the Stam region, resolving a conjecture of A. R. Barron and the first author. On the other hand, the entropy power of a sum of independent random vectors is not supermodular in any dimension. We also develop some qualitative properties of the Stam region, sho…
The symmetric convex hull of random points that are independent and distributed according to the cone probability measure on the $\ell_p$-unit sphere of $\mathbb R^n$ for some $1\leq p < \infty$ is considered. We prove that these random polytopes have uniformly absolutely bounded isotropic constants with overwhelming probability. This generalizes the result for the Euclidean sphere ($p=2$) obtained by D. Alonso-Gutiérrez. The proof requires several different tools including a probabilistic representation of the cone measure due to G. Schechtman and J. Zinn and moment estimates for sums of inde…
Over the past few years, a family of interesting new inequalities for the entropies of sums and differences of random variables has been developed by Ruzsa, Tao and others, motivated by analogous results in additive combinatorics. The present work extends these earlier results to the case of random variables taking values in $\mathbb{R}^n$ or, more generally, in arbitrary locally compact and Polish abelian groups. We isolate and study a key quantity, the Ruzsa divergence between two probability distributions, and we show that its properties can be used to extend the earlier inequalities to the…