97

Non-asymptotic moment bounds for random variablesrounded to non-uniformly spaced sets

Abstract

We study the effects of rounding on the moments of a random variable. Specifically, given a random variable XX and its rounded counterpart rd(X)\operatorname{rd}(X), we study E[Xk]E[rd(X)k]|\mathbf{E}[X^k] - \mathbf{E}[\operatorname{rd}(X)^{k}]| for non-negative integer kk. We consider the case that the rounding function rd:RF\operatorname{rd} : \mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{F} corresponds either to (i) rounding to the nearest point in some discrete set F\mathbb{F} or (ii) rounding randomly to either the nearest larger or smaller point in this same set with probabilities proportional to the distances to these points. In both cases, we show, under reasonable assumptions on the density function of XX, how to compute a constant CC such that E[Xk]E[rd(X)k]<Cϵ2|\mathbb{E}[X^k] - \mathbb{E}[\operatorname{rd}(X)^{k}]| < C \epsilon^2, provided rd(x)xϵE(x)\operatorname{rd}(x) - x| \leq \epsilon E(x). Asymptotic and non-asymptotic bounds for the absolute moments E[Xkrd(X)k]\mathbb{E}[ |X^k-\operatorname{rd}(X)^{k}| ] are also given.

View on arXiv
Comments on this paper