In this paper we revisit Talagrand's proof of concentration inequality for empirical processes. We give a different shorter proof of the main technical lemma that guarantees the existence of a certain kernel. Our proof provides the almost optimal value of the constant involved in the statement of this lemma.
This note presents a sharp transport-entropy inequality that improves on Talagrand's inequality for the Gaussian measure, arising as a dual formulation of the functional Santaló inequality. We also discuss some extensions and connections with concentration of measure.
Talagrand's inequality for independent Bernoulli random variables is extended to many interacting particle systems (IPS). The main assumption is that the IPS satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality. In this context it is also shown that a slightly stronger version of Talagrand's inequality is equivalent to a log-Sobolev inequality. Additionally we also look at a common application, the relation between the probability of increasing events and the influences on that event by changing a single spin.
This note reviews the studies of the last decades emphasizing a common principle based on entropy, logarithmic Sobolev inequality and hypercontractivity, behind four most celebrated inequalities by M. Talagrand: the convex distance inequality, the $\mathrm {L}^1$-$\mathrm {L}^2$ variance inequality, the quadratic transportation cost inequality, and the inequality on the supremum of empirical processes.
By using a split argument due to [1], the transportation cost inequality is established on the free path space of Markov processes. The general result is applied to stochastic reaction diffusion equations with random initial values.
In this article we study generalization of the classical Talagrand transport-entropy inequality in which the Wasserstein distance is replaced by the entropic transportation cost. This class of inequalities has been introduced in the recent work [9], in connection with the study of Schrödinger bridges. We provide several equivalent characterizations in terms of reverse hypercontractivity for the heat semigroup, contractivity of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman semigroup and dimension-free concentration of measure. Properties such as tensorization and relations to other functional inequalities are al…
One way to define the concentration of measure phenomenon is via Talagrand inequalities, also called transportation-information inequalities. That is, a comparison of the Wasserstein distance from the given measure to any other absolutely continuous measure with finite relative entropy. Such transportation-information inequalities were recently established for some stochastic differential equations. Here, we develop a similar theory for some stochastic partial differential equations.
We show that Talagrand's transport inequality is equivalent to a restricted logarithmic Sobolev inequality. This result clarifies the links between these two important functional inequalities. As an application, we give the first proof of the fact that Talagrand's inequality is stable under bounded perturbations.
We give by simple arguments sufficient conditions, so called Lyapunov conditions, for Talagrand's transportation information inequality and for the logarithmic Sobolev inequality. Those sufficient conditions work even in the case where the Bakry-Emery curvature is not lower bounded. Several new examples are provided.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we prove transportation inequalities ${\bf T_2}(C)$ on the space of continuous paths with respect to the uniform metric for the law of the solution to a class of non-linear monotone stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) driven by the Wiener noise. Furthermore, we also establish the ${\bf T_1}(C)$ property for such SPDEs but with merely locally monotone coefficients, including the stochastic Burgers type equation and stochastic $2$-D Navier-Stokes equation.
The paper reexamines an argument by Talagrand that leads to a remarkable exponential tail bound for the concentration of probability near a set. The main novelty is the replacement of a mysterious Calculus inequality by an application of Jensen's inequality.
Let f be a stationary isotropic non-degenerate Gaussian field on R^2. Assume that f = q * W where q is both C^2 and L^2 and W is the L^2 white noise on R^2. We extend a result by Stephen Muirhead and Hugo Vanneuville by showing that, assuming that q * q is pointwise non-negative and has fast enough decay, the set {f > -l} percolates with probability one when l > 0 and with probability zero if l < 0 or l = 0. We also prove exponential decay of crossing probabilities and uniqueness of the unbounded cluster. To this end, we study a Gaussian field g defined on the torus and establish a superconcen…
This note is concerned with an extension, at second order, of an inequality on the discrete cube $C_n=\{-1,1\}$ (equipped with the uniform measure) due to Talagrand (\cite{TalL1L2}). As an application, the main result of this note is a Theorem in the spirit of a famous result from Kahn, Kalai and Linial (cf. \cite{KKL}) concerning the influence of Boolean functions. The notion of the influence of a couple of coordinates $(i,j)\in\{1,\ldots,n\}^2$ is introduced in section 2 and the following alternative is obtained : for any Boolean function $f\,:\, C_n\to \{0,1\}$, either there exists a coordi…
We survey several Talagrand type inequalities and their application to influences with the tool of hypercontractivity for both discrete and continuous, and product and non-product models. The approach covers similarly by a simple interpolation the framework of geometric influences recently developed by N. Keller, E. Mossel and A. Sen. Geometric Brascamp-Lieb decompositions are also considered in this context.
We give a short proof of the free analogue of the Talagrand inequality for the transportation cost to the semicircular which was originally proved by Biane and Voiculescu. The proof is based on a convexity argument and is in the spirit of the original Talagrand's proof. We also discuss the convergence, fluctuations and large deviations of the energy of the eigenvalues of beta ensembles, which gives also yet another proof of the convergence of the eigenvalue distribution to the semicircle law.
We show that the quadratic transportation cost inequality $T_2$ is equivalent to both a Poincaré inequality and a strong form of the Gaussian concentration property. The main ingredient in the proof is a new family of inequalities, called modified quadratic transportation cost inequalities in the spirit of the modified logarithmic-Sobolev inequalities by Bobkov and Ledoux \cite{BL97}, that are shown to hold as soon as a Poincaré inequality is satisfied.
We provide deficit estimates for Nelson's hypercontractivity inequality, the logarithmic Sobolev inequality, and Talagrand's transportation cost inequality under the restriction that the inputs are semi-log-subharmonic, semi-log-convex, or semi-log-concave. In particular, our result on the logarithmic Sobolev inequality complements a recently obtained result by Eldan, Lehec and Shenfeld concerning a deficit estimate for inputs with small covariance. Similarly, our result on Talagrand's transportation cost inequality complements and, for a large class of semi-log-concave inputs, improves a defi…
We establish a dimension-free improvement of Talagrand's Gaussian transport-entropy inequality, under the assumption that the measures satisfy a Poincaré inequality. We also study stability of the inequality, in terms of relative entropy, when restricted to measures whose covariance matrix trace is smaller than the ambient dimension. In case the covariance matrix is strictly smaller than the identity, we give dimension-free estimates which depend on its eigenvalues. To complement our results, we show that our conditions cannot be relaxed, and that there exist measures with covariance larger th…
Recently Talagrand [T] estimated the deviation of a function on $\{0,1\}^n$ from its median in terms of the Lipschitz constant of a convex extension of $f$ to $\ell ^n_2$; namely, he proved that $$P(|f-M_f| > c) \le 4 e^{-t^2/4σ^2}$$ where $σ$ is the Lipschitz constant of the extension of $f$ and $P$ is the natural probability on $\{0,1\}^n$. Here we extend this inequality to more general product probability spaces; in particular, we prove the same inequality for $\{0,1\}^n$ with the product measure $((1-η)δ_0 + ηδ_1)^n$. We believe this should be useful in proofs involving random selections. …
We introduce a symmetrization technique that allows us to translate a problem of controlling the deviation of some functionals on a product space from their mean into a problem of controlling the deviation between two independent copies of the functional. As an application we give a new easy proof of Talagrand's concentration inequality for empirical processes, where besides symmetrization we use only Talagrand's concentration inequality on the discrete cube {-1,+1}^n. As another application of this technique we prove new Vapnik-Chervonenkis type inequalities. For example, for VC-classes of fu…
We characterize the symmetric measures which satisfy the one dimensional convex infimum convolution inequality of Maurey. For these measures the tensorization argument yields the two level Talagrand's concentration inequalities for their products and convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^n$.
The optimal transport problem studies how to transport one measure to another in the most cost-effective way and has wide range of applications from economics to machine learning. In this paper, we introduce and study an information constrained variation of this problem. Our study yields a strengthening and generalization of Talagrand's celebrated transportation cost inequality. Following Marton's approach, we show that the new transportation cost inequality can be used to recover old and new concentration of measure results. Finally, we provide an application of this new inequality to network…
We obtain a Bernstein type Gaussian concentration inequality for martingales. Our inequality improves the Azuma-Hoeffding inequality for moderate deviations $x$. Following the work of McDiarmid (1989), Talagrand (1996) and Boucheron, Lugosi and Massart (2000,2003), we show that our result can be applied to the concentration of random functions, Erdös-Rényi random graph, and maxima of empirical processes. Several interesting Gaussian concentration inequalities have been obtained.
We show sharp bounds for probabilities of large deviations for sums of independent random variables satisfying Bernstein's condition. One such bound is very close to the tail of the standard Gaussian law in certain case; other bounds improve the inequalities of Bennett and Hoeffding by adding missing factors in the spirit of Talagrand (1995). We also complete Talagrand's inequality by giving a lower bound of the same form, leading to an equality. As a consequence, we obtain large deviation expansions similar to those of Cramér (1938), Bahadur-Rao (1960) and Sakhanenko (1991). We also show that…
The classical correlation inequality of Harris asserts that any two monotone increasing families on the discrete cube are nonnegatively correlated. In 1996, Talagrand established a lower bound on the correlation in terms of how much the two families depend simultaneously on the same coordinates. Talagrand's method and results inspired a number of important works in combinatorics and probability theory. In this paper we present stronger correlation lower bounds that hold when the increasing families satisfy natural regularity or symmetry conditions. In addition, we present several new classes o…
In this paper we give optimal constants in Talagrand's concentration inequalities for maxima of empirical processes associated to independent and eventually nonidentically distributed random variables. Our approach is based on the entropy method introduced by Ledoux.
We study Talagrand concentration and Poincaré type inequalities for unbounded pure jump Markov processes. In particular we focus on processes with degenerate jumps that depend on the past of the whole system, based on the model introduced by Galves and Löcherbach in \cite{G-L}, in order to describe the activity of a biological neural network. As a result we obtain exponential rates of convergence to equilibrium.
Threshold phenomena are investigated using a general approach, following Talagrand [Ann. Probab. 22 (1994) 1576--1587] and Friedgut and Kalai [Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 12 (1999) 1017--1054]. The general upper bound for the threshold width of symmetric monotone properties is improved. This follows from a new lower bound on the maximal influence of a variable on a Boolean function. The method of proof is based on a well-known logarithmic Sobolev inequality on $\{0,1\}^n$. This new bound is shown to be asymptotically optimal.
In this short note we derive concentration inequalities for the empirical absolute moments of square symmetric matrices with independent symmetrically distributed +/-1 entries. Most of the previous results of this type are limited to functions with bounded Lipschitz constant, and therefore exclude the moments from consideration. Based on the fine analysis of the distribution of the largest eigenvalues developed by Soshnikov and Sinai, we extend the measure concentration tools of Talagrand to encompass power functions.
We prove that quadratic forms in isotropic random vectors $X$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$, possessing the convex concentration property with constant $K$, satisfy the Hanson-Wright inequality with constant $CK$, where $C$ is an absolute constant, thus eliminating the logarithmic (in the dimension) factors in a recent estimate by Vu and Wang. We also show that the concentration inequality for all Lipschitz functions implies a uniform version of the Hanson-Wright inequality for suprema of quadratic forms (in the spirit of the inequalities by Borell, Arcones-Giné and Ledoux-Talagrand). Previous results of …
We prove that reflected Brownian motion with normal reflections in a convex domain satisfies a dimension free Talagrand type transportation cost-information inequality. The result is generalized to other reflected diffusions with suitable drifts and diffusions. We apply this to get such an inequality for interacting Brownian particles with rank-based drift and diffusion coefficients such as the infinite Atlas model. This is an improvement over earlier dimension-dependent results.
We present concentration inequalities on the multislice which are based on (modified) log-Sobolev inequalities. This includes bounds for convex functions and multilinear polynomials. As an application we show concentration results for the triangle count in the $G(n,M)$ Erdős--Rényi model resembling known bounds in the $G(n,p)$ case. Moreover, we give a proof of Talagrand's convex distance inequality for the multislice. Interpreting the multislice in a sampling without replacement context, we furthermore present concentration results for $n$ out of $N$ sampling without replacement. Based on a b…
We prove concentration inequalities for general functions of weakly dependent random variables satisfying the Dobrushin condition. In particular, we show Talagrand's convex distance inequality for this type of dependence. We apply our bounds to a version of the stochastic salesman problem, the Steiner tree problem, the total magnetisation of the Curie-Weiss model with external field, and exponential random graph models. Our proof uses the exchangeable pair method for proving concentration inequalities introduced by Chatterjee (2005). Another key ingredient of the proof is a subclass of $(a,b)$…
In this paper, we prove a Talagrand's T2 transportation cost-information inequality for the law of a stochastic wave equation in spatial dimension d=3 driven by the Gaussian random field, white in time and correlated in space, on the continuous paths space with respect to the uniform topology.
We consider a generic modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality (mLSI) of the form $\mathrm{Ent}_μ(e^f) \le \tfracρ{2} \mathbb{E}_μe^f Γ(f)^2$ for some difference operator $Γ$, and show how it implies two-level concentration inequalities akin to the Hanson--Wright or Bernstein inequality. This can be applied to the continuous (e.\,g. the sphere or bounded perturbations of product measures) as well as discrete setting (the symmetric group, finite measures satisfying an approximate tensorization property, \ldots). Moreover, we use modified logarithmic Sobolev inequalities on the symmetric group $S…
In this note, we obtain a Gaussian concentration inequality for a class of non-Lipschitz functions. In the one-dimensional case, our results supplement those established by Paouris and Valettas in [8].
In this expository note, we give a modern proof of Hanson-Wright inequality for quadratic forms in sub-gaussian random variables. We deduce a useful concentration inequality for sub-gaussian random vectors. Two examples are given to illustrate these results: a concentration of distances between random vectors and subspaces, and a bound on the norms of products of random and deterministic matrices.
Using Talagrand's concentration inequality on the discrete cube {0,1}^m we show that given a real-valued function Z(x)on {0,1}^m that satisfies certain monotonicity conditions one can control the deviations of Z(x) above its median by a local Lipschitz norm of Z(x) at the point x. As one application, we give a simple proof of a nearly optimal deviation inequality for the number of k-cycles in a random graph.
We obtain a concentration inequality for the maximum degree of a vertex in a uniformly random dissection of a polygon. This resolves a conjecture posed by Curien and Kortchemski in 2012. Our approach is based on a bijection with dual trees and the tools of analytic combinatorics.
In the paper we pursue the analysis from the section 5 of the Talagrand's paper "Sample boundedness of stochastic processes under increment conditions." Ann. Probab. 18, No. 1, 1-49. In particular we give the proof of some Sobolev Inequality and then apply it to obtain if and only if condition for all processes with bounded icrements to have bounded samples. The processes are defined on a compact, concave subspaces of $\R^n$ with a metric $d(s,t)=η(||s-t||)$, where $η$ is concave and $||.||$ is a norm on $\R^n$.
We present a proof of the concentration inequality for a discrete random surface model, where the underlying potential is perturbed by an additive random potential. The proof is based on annealing the random potential, and follows the method of [CEP96] and other works. Our result demonstrates the robustness of this method.
In this paper a concentration inequality is proved for the deviation in the ergodic theorem in the case of discrete time observations of diffusion processes. The proof is based on the geometric ergodicity property for diffusion processes. As an application we consider the nonparametric pointwise estimation problem for the drift coefficient under discrete time observations.
The classical Gaussian concentration inequality for Lipschitz functions is adapted to a setting where the classical assumptions (i.e. Lipschitz and Gaussian) are not met. The theory is more direct than much of the existing theory designed to handle related generalizations. An application is presented to linear combinations of heavy tailed random variables.
The aim of this paper is to show that a probability measure concentrates independently of the dimension like a gaussian measure if and only if it verifies Talagrand's $\T_2$ transportation-cost inequality. This theorem permits us to give a new and very short proof of a result of Otto and Villani. Generalizations to other types of concentration are also considered. In particular, one shows that the Poincaré inequality is equivalent to a certain form of dimension free exponential concentration. The proofs of these results rely on simple Large Deviations techniques.
We estimate the concentration functions of $n$-fold convolutions of one-dimensional probability measures. The main result is a supplement to the results of Götze and Zaitsev (1998). We show that the estimation of concentration functions at arguments of bounded size can be reduced to the estimation of these functions at arguments of size $O(\sqrt n)$ which is easier.
We derive concentration inequalities for empirical means $\frac{1}{t} \int_0^t f(X_s) ds$ where $X_s$ is an irreducible Markov jump process on a finite state space and $f$ some observable. Using a Feynman-Kac semigroup we first derive a general concentration inequality. Then, based on this inequality we derive further concentration inequalities. Hereby we use three different methods; perturbation theory, Poincaré inequalities and information inequalities. We also obtain a Bernstein type concentration inequality.
The concentration inequality approach for normal approximation by Stein's method is generalized to the multivariate setting. We use this approach to prove a non-smooth function distance for multivariate normal approximation for standardized sums of $k$-dimensional independent random vectors $W=\sum_{i=1}^n X_i$ with an error bound of order $k^{1/2}γ$ where $γ=\sum_{i=1}^n E|X_i|^3$. For sums of locally dependent (unbounded) random vectors, we obtain a fourth moment bound which is typically of order $O_k(1/\sqrt{n})$, as well as a third moment bound which is typically of order $O_k(\log n/\sqrt…
Following Talagrand's concentration results for permutations picked uniformly at random from a symmetric group [Tal95], Luczak and McDiarmid have generalized it to more general groups G of permutations which act suitably 'locally'. Here we extend their results by setting transport-entropy inequalities on these permutations groups. Talagrand and Luczak-Mc-Diarmid concentra- tion properties are consequences of these inequalities. The results are also gen- eralised to a larger class of measures including Ewens distributions of arbitrary parameter $θ$ on the symmetric group. By projection, we deri…
An inequality of K. Marton shows that the joint distribution of a Markov chain with uniformly contracting transition kernels exhibits concentration. We prove an analogous inequality for broadcast models on finite trees. We use this inequality to develop a condition for the sequence of depth-$k$ marginals of a broadcast model on a rooted infinite tree to form a normal Lévy family in terms of the Lipschitz constants of the transition kernels and the growth rate of the tree.
Given two vectors in Euclidean space, how unlikely is it that a random vector has a larger inner product with the shorter vector than with the longer one? When the random vector has independent, identically distributed components, we conjecture that this probability is no more than a constant multiple of the ratio of the Euclidean norms of the two given vectors, up to an additive term to allow for the possibility that the longer vector has more arithmetic structure. We give some partial results to support the basic conjecture.
In this article we derive Talagrand's $T_2$ inequality on the path space w.r.t. the maximum norm for various stochastic processes, including solutions of one-dimensional stochastic differential equations with measurable drifts, backward stochastic differential equations, and the value process of optimal stopping problems. The proofs do not make use of the Girsanov method, but of pathwise arguments. These are used to show that all our processes of interest are Lipschitz transformations of processes which are known to satisfy desired functional inequalities.