Concentration inequalities for sampling without replacement

Abstract

Concentration inequalities quantify the deviation of a random variable from a fixed value. In spite of numerous applications, such as opinion surveys or ecological counting procedures, few concentration results are known for the setting of sampling without replacement from a finite population. Until now, the best general concentration inequality has been a Hoeffding inequality due to Serfling [Ann. Statist. 2 (1974) 39-48]. In this paper, we first improve on the fundamental result of Serfling [Ann. Statist. 2 (1974) 39-48], and further extend it to obtain a Bernstein concentration bound for sampling without replacement. We then derive an empirical version of our bound that does not require the variance to be known to the user.

Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/14-BEJ605 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm)

References in corpus (2)

• Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent Methods for Regularized Loss Minimization
• Empirical Bernstein Bounds and Sample Variance Penalization

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