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Lecture

Extension of the Weak Law: St. Petersburg's Paradox

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 delves into the extension of the weak law of large numbers, using St. Petersburg's paradox as an example. The instructor discusses the concept of tossing a fair coin until it falls on heads, exploring the total number of losses and the expected rewards. Various propositions and calculations are presented to illustrate the paradox and its implications.

Instructors (2)

Yanina Yurina Shkel

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.

Official source

Related concepts (28)

Law of large numbers

In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value and tends to become closer to the expected value as more trials are performed. The LLN is important because it guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of some random events.

Probability

Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking, 0 indicates impossibility of the event and 1 indicates certainty. The higher the probability of an event, the more likely it is that the event will occur. A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin.

Probability theory

Probability theory or probability calculus is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set of axioms. Typically these axioms formalise probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure taking values between 0 and 1, termed the probability measure, to a set of outcomes called the sample space.

Conditional probability

In probability theory, conditional probability is a measure of the probability of an event occurring, given that another event (by assumption, presumption, assertion or evidence) has already occurred. This particular method relies on event B occurring with some sort of relationship with another event A. In this event, the event B can be analyzed by a conditional probability with respect to A. If the event of interest is A and the event B is known or assumed to have occurred, "the conditional probability of A given B", or "the probability of A under the condition B", is usually written as P(AB) or occasionally P_B(A).

Probability distribution

In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events (subsets of the sample space). For instance, if X is used to denote the outcome of a coin toss ("the experiment"), then the probability distribution of X would take the value 0.5 (1 in 2 or 1/2) for X = heads, and 0.

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