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The Lower Tail: Poisson Approximation Revisited

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Part of the book series: Trends in Mathematics ((RPCRMB,volume 6))

Abstract

The well-known Janson’s inequality gives Poisson-like upper bounds for the lower tail probability \(\mathbb{P}(X\leqslant (1-\varepsilon )\mathbb{E}X)\) when X is the sum of dependent indicator random variables of a special form. In joint work with Svante Janson we showed that, for large deviations, this inequality is optimal whenever X is approximately Poisson, i.e., when the dependencies are weak. For subgraph counts in random graphs, this, e.g., yields new lower tail estimates, extending earlier work (for the special case ɛ = 1) of Janson, Łuczak and Ruciński.

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References

  1. N. Alon and J. Spencer, “The probabilistic method”, third edition, Wiley-Interscience Series in Discrete Mathematics and Optimization, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2008).

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  2. S. Janson, “Poisson approximation for large deviations”, Random Struct. Alg. 1 (1990), 221–229.

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  3. S. Janson, T. Łuczak, and A. Ruciński, “An exponential bound for the probability of nonexistence of a specified subgraph in a random graph”, in Random Graphs ’87 (1990), 73–87.

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  4. S. Janson, T. Łuczak, and A. Ruciński, “Random graphs”, Wiley-Interscience Series in Discrete Mathematics and Optimization, Wiley-Interscience, New York (2000).

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  5. S. Janson and L. Warnke, “The lower tail: Poisson approximation revisited”, Random Struct. Alg. Available at arXiv:1406.1248. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/advanced/search/results?start=1

  6. O. Riordan and L. Warnke, “The Janson inequalities for general up-sets”, Random Struct. Alg. 46 (2015), 391–395.

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  7. L. Warnke, “Upper tails for arithmetic progressions in random subsets”, Israel J. Math., to appear, available at https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~lw468/aput.pdf.

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Acknowledgements

Svante Janson was partly supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

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Correspondence to Svante Janson .

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Janson, S., Warnke, L. (2017). The Lower Tail: Poisson Approximation Revisited. In: Díaz, J., Kirousis, L., Ortiz-Gracia, L., Serna, M. (eds) Extended Abstracts Summer 2015. Trends in Mathematics(), vol 6. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51753-7_12

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