Total Variation Distance
In probability theory, the total variation distance is a distance measure for probability distributions. It is an example of a statistical distance metric, and is sometimes called the statistical distance, statistical difference or variational distance. Definition Consider a measurable space (\Omega, \mathcal) and probability measures P and Q defined on (\Omega, \mathcal). The total variation distance between P and Q is defined as: :\delta(P,Q)=\sup_\left, P(A)-Q(A)\. Informally, this is the largest possible difference between the probabilities that the two probability distributions can assign to the same event. Properties Relation to other distances The total variation distance is related to the Kullback–Leibler divergence by Pinsker’s inequality: :\delta(P,Q) \le \sqrt. One also has the following inequality, due to Bretagnolle and Huber (see, also, Tsybakov), which has the advantage of providing a non-vacuous bound even when D_(P\parallel Q)>2: :\delta(P,Q) \le \sqrt ...
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Probability Theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set of axioms. Typically these axioms formalise probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure taking values between 0 and 1, termed the probability measure, to a set of outcomes called the sample space. Any specified subset of the sample space is called an event. Central subjects in probability theory include discrete and continuous random variables, probability distributions, and stochastic processes (which provide mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic or uncertain processes or measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in a random fashion). Although it is not possible to perfectly predict random events, much can be said about their behavior. Two major results in probability ...
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Markov Chains And Mixing Times
''Markov Chains and Mixing Times'' is a book on Markov chain mixing times. The second edition was written by David A. Levin, and Yuval Peres. Elizabeth Wilmer was a co-author on the first edition and is credited as a contributor to the second edition. The first edition was published in 2009 by the American Mathematical Society, with an expanded second edition in 2017. Background A Markov chain is a stochastic process defined by a set of states and, for each state, a probability distribution on the states. Starting from an initial state, it follows a sequence of states where each state in the sequence is chosen randomly from the distribution associated with the previous state. In that sense, it is "memoryless": each random choice depends only on the current state, and not on the past history of states. Under mild restrictions, a Markov chain with a finite set of states will have a stationary distribution that it converges to, meaning that, after a sufficiently large number of steps, ...
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