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The Second Moment Method

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Extremal Combinatorics

Part of the book series: Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series ((TTCS))

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Abstract

The pigeonhole property of expectation says that a random variable X cannot always be smaller (or always greater) than its expectation E[X]. The second moment property tells us more: if the variance of X is much smaller than E[X]2 then X is almost always near to E[X], that is, the values of X are concentrated around its expectation.

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Correspondence to Stasys Jukna .

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jukna, S. (2011). The Second Moment Method. In: Extremal Combinatorics. Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17364-6_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17364-6_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17363-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17364-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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