## Friday, April 24, 2009

### 2 inequalities

1.

Let mu and nu be two Bernoulli measures on {0,1}, with biases p and q, respectively. Thus,
mu({1})=p=1-mu({0})
nu({1})=q=1-nu({0})

Let P and Q be the n-fold products of mu and nu, respectively. Thus, P and Q are two probability measures on {0,1}^n.

Show that
||P-Q|| <= n|p-q|
where ||.|| is the total variation norm (and <= is a poor man's way of writing \leq in plain text).

2.

Now assume that q = 1/2; thus Q is the uniform measure on {0,1}^n.

Show that
||P-Q|| <= C n^(1/2) |p-1/2|

where C>0 is some fixed universal constant. (Hint: Pinsker's inequality might come in handy.)

Are these novel or already known?

Ryan O'Donnell said...

Known, I would say. In fact, so long as p and q are close and not too close to 0 and 1, then the total variation distance is O(sqrt(n)).

See, e.g., Exercise 21 (with solution) here:

http://www.stat.yale.edu/~pollard/Books/Asymptopia/Metrics.pdf

(or some of the calculations here:
http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Passing_between_measures
)