Large Deviations of Vector-valued Martingales in 2-Smooth Normed Spaces

In this paper, we derive exponential bounds on probabilities of large deviations for “light tail” martingales taking values in finite-dimensional normed spaces. Our primary emphasis is on the case where the bounds are dimension-independent or nearly so. We demonstrate that this is the case when the norm on the space can be approximated, within an … Read more

A Sample Approximation Approach for Optimization with Probabilistic Constraints

We study approximations of optimization problems with probabilistic constraints in which the original distribution of the underlying random vector is replaced with an empirical distribution obtained from a random sample. We show that such a sample approximation problem with risk level larger than the required risk level will yield a lower bound to the true … Read more

Sums of Random Symmetric Matrices and Applications

Let B_i be deterministic symmetric m\times m matrices, and \xi_i be independent random scalars with zero mean and “of order of one” (e.g., \xi_i are Gaussian with zero mean and unit standard deviation). We are interested in conditions for the “typical norm” of the random matrix S_N = \xi_1B_1+…+\xi_NB_N to be of order of 1. … Read more