No Arabic abstract
Mixtures are convex combinations of laws. Despite this simple definition, a mixture can be far more subtle than its mixed components. For instance, mixing Gaussian laws may produce a potential with multiple deep wells. We study in the present work fine properties of mixtures with respect to concentration of measure and Sobolev type functional inequalities. We provide sharp Laplace bounds for Lipschitz functions in the case of generic mixtures, involving a transportation cost diameter of the mixed family. Additionally, our analysis of Sobolev type inequalities for two-component mixtures reveals natural relations with some kind of band isoperimetry and support constrained interpolation via mass transportation. We show that the Poincare constant of a two-component mixture may remain bounded as the mixture proportion goes to 0 or 1 while the logarithmic Sobolev constant may surprisingly blow up. This counter-intuitive result is not reducible to support disconnections, and appears as a reminiscence of the variance-entropy comparison on the two-point space. As far as mixtures are concerned, the logarithmic Sobolev inequality is less stable than the Poincare inequality and the sub-Gaussian concentration for Lipschitz functions. We illustrate our results on a gallery of concrete two-component mixtures. This work leads to many open questions.
Concentration properties of functionals of general Poisson processes are studied. Using a modified $Phi$-Sobolev inequality a recursion scheme for moments is established, which is of independent interest. This is applied to derive moment and concentration inequalities for functionals on abstract Poisson spaces. Applications of the general results in stochastic geometry, namely Poisson cylinder models and Poisson random polytopes, are presented as well.
A central tool in the study of nonhomogeneous random matrices, the noncommutative Khintchine inequality of Lust-Piquard and Pisier, yields a nonasymptotic bound on the spectral norm of general Gaussian random matrices $X=sum_i g_i A_i$ where $g_i$ are independent standard Gaussian variables and $A_i$ are matrix coefficients. This bound exhibits a logarithmic dependence on dimension that is sharp when the matrices $A_i$ commute, but often proves to be suboptimal in the presence of noncommutativity. In this paper, we develop nonasymptotic bounds on the spectrum of arbitrary Gaussian random matrices that can capture noncommutativity. These bounds quantify the degree to which the deterministic matrices $A_i$ behave as though they are freely independent. This intrinsic freeness phenomenon provides a powerful tool for the study of various questions that are outside the reach of classical methods of random matrix theory. Our nonasymptotic bounds are easily applicable in concrete situations, and yield sharp results in examples where the noncommutative Khintchine inequality is suboptimal. When combined with a linearization argument, our bounds imply strong asymptotic freeness (in the sense of Haagerup-Thorbj{o}rnsen) for a remarkably general class of Gaussian random matrix models, including matrices that may be very sparse and that lack any special symmetries. Beyond the Gaussian setting, we develop matrix concentration inequalities that capture noncommutativity for general sums of independent random matrices, which arise in many problems of pure and applied mathematics.
Concentration bounds for non-product, non-Haar measures are fairly recent: the first such result was obtained for contracting Markov chains by Marton in 1996 via the coupling method. The work that followed, with few exceptions, also used coupling. Although this technique is of unquestionable utility as a theoretical tool, it is not always simple to apply. As an alternative to coupling, we use the elementary Markov contraction lemma to obtain simple, useful, and apparently novel concentration results for various Markov-type processes. Our technique consists of expressing probabilities as matrix products and applying Markov contraction to these expressions; thus it is fairly general and holds the potential to yield further results in this vein.
We prove that if ${(P_x)}_{xin mathscr X}$ is a family of probability measures which satisfy the log-Sobolev inequality and whose pairwise chi-squared divergences are uniformly bounded, and $mu$ is any mixing distribution on $mathscr X$, then the mixture $int P_x , mathrm{d} mu(x)$ satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality. In various settings of interest, the resulting log-Sobolev constant is dimension-free. In particular, our result implies a conjecture of Zimmermann and Bardet et al. that Gaussian convolutions of measures with bounded support enjoy dimension-free log-Sobolev inequalities.
We consider a general class of metric measure spaces equipped with a regular Dirichlet form and then provide a lower bound on the hitting time probabilities of the associated Hunt process. Using these estimates we establish (i) a generalization of the classical Liebs inequality on metric measure spaces and (ii) uniqueness of nonnegative super-solutions on metric measure spaces. Finally, using heat-kernel estimates we generalize the local Faber-Krahn inequality recently obtained in [LS18].