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Lecture

Probability Theory: Laws and Convergence

Description

This lecture covers Borel-Cantelli lemmas, laws of random variables, constructing random variables with arbitrary laws, and convergence in probability. It also discusses the concept of simple random variables and the completion of metric spaces.

Instructor

Thomas Mountford

D'origine britannique, né en 1961. Il a reçu la bourse présidentielle des jeunes investisseurs (Presidential Young Investigator Grant) en 1990 et le prix de la Fraternité Sloan (Sloan Fellowship) en 1991. Son travail montre que les valeurs critiques d'une classe large de de systèmes de particules proches sont égales à 1, et que, suite à plusieurs travaux sur la trajectoire du mouvement brownien, incluant une simulation numérique, le nombre d'îlots browniens en 2 dimensions tend vers l'infini quand leurs tailles tendent vers 0. Il reçoit le prix Rosenbaum en 1993 lui ouvrant ainsi les portes du Isaac Newton Institute à Cambridge. Il est également décoré par le prix Rollo Davidson en 1995 et nommé membre honoraire de l'Institute of Mathematical Statistics en 2001. Assistant Profeseur de Mathematique a UCLA 1987- 1991 Associate Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1991-1993 Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1993-2001 Professeur Departement de mathématiques, EPFL dès 2001

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Mathematics

Analysis: Functional analysis

Topology: General topology

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

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.

Complete metric space

In mathematical analysis, a metric space M is called complete (or a Cauchy space) if every Cauchy sequence of points in M has a limit that is also in M. Intuitively, a space is complete if there are no "points missing" from it (inside or at the boundary). For instance, the set of rational numbers is not complete, because e.g. is "missing" from it, even though one can construct a Cauchy sequence of rational numbers that converges to it (see further examples below).

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.

Exchangeable random variables

In statistics, an exchangeable sequence of random variables (also sometimes interchangeable) is a sequence X1, X2, X3, ... (which may be finitely or infinitely long) whose joint probability distribution does not change when the positions in the sequence in which finitely many of them appear are altered. Thus, for example the sequences both have the same joint probability distribution. It is closely related to the use of independent and identically distributed random variables in statistical models.

Metric space

In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of distance between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are the most general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry. The most familiar example of a metric space is 3-dimensional Euclidean space with its usual notion of distance. Other well-known examples are a sphere equipped with the angular distance and the hyperbolic plane.

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