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Lecture

Complement: Convergence in Distribution

In course

COM-417: Advanced probability and applications

In this course, various aspects of probability theory are considered. The first part covers the main theorems in the field (law of large numbers, central limit theorem), while the second part focuses on the theory of martingales and concentration inequalit ...

Description

This lecture discusses the convergence in distribution of random variables through a sequence (Xn, naa) and explores counter-examples where the sequence does not converge. It covers the characteristic functions and their properties, such as the relationship between the characteristic function and the distribution function.

Instructors (2)

Olivier Lévêque

Olivier Lévêque was born in Switzerland in 1971. He received the physics diploma from EPFL in 1995 and completed his PhD in mathematics at EPFL in 2001. Since then, he has been with the Laboratory of Information Theory at EPFL. He spent the academical year 2005-2006 at the Electrical Engineering Department of Stanford University, where he was appointed as lecturer. His research interests include stochastic analysis, random matrices, wireless communications and information theory.

Yanina Yurina Shkel

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Cauchy distribution

The Cauchy distribution, named after Augustin Cauchy, is a continuous probability distribution. It is also known, especially among physicists, as the Lorentz distribution (after Hendrik Lorentz), Cauchy–Lorentz distribution, Lorentz(ian) function, or Breit–Wigner distribution. The Cauchy distribution is the distribution of the x-intercept of a ray issuing from with a uniformly distributed angle. It is also the distribution of the ratio of two independent normally distributed random variables with mean zero.

Normal distribution

In statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is The parameter is the mean or expectation of the distribution (and also its median and mode), while the parameter is its standard deviation. The variance of the distribution is . A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed, and is called a normal deviate.

Convergence of random variables

In probability theory, there exist several different notions of convergence of random variables. The convergence of sequences of random variables to some limit random variable is an important concept in probability theory, and its applications to statistics and stochastic processes. The same concepts are known in more general mathematics as stochastic convergence and they formalize the idea that a sequence of essentially random or unpredictable events can sometimes be expected to settle down into a behavior that is essentially unchanging when items far enough into the sequence are studied.

Empirical distribution function

In statistics, an empirical distribution function (commonly also called an empirical cumulative distribution function, eCDF) is the distribution function associated with the empirical measure of a sample. This cumulative distribution function is a step function that jumps up by 1/n at each of the n data points. Its value at any specified value of the measured variable is the fraction of observations of the measured variable that are less than or equal to the specified value.

Random variable

A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. The term 'random variable' can be misleading as it is not actually random nor a variable, but rather it is a function from possible outcomes (e.g., the possible upper sides of a flipped coin such as heads and tails ) in a sample space (e.g., the set ) to a measurable space (e.g., in which 1 corresponding to and −1 corresponding to ), often to the real numbers.

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