User-Friendly Tail Bounds for Sums of Random Matrices

By Joel A. Tropp. 2010

1,921 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents new probability inequalities for sums of independent, random, self-adjoint matrices. These results place simple and easily verifiable hypotheses on the summands, and they deliver strong conclusions about the large-deviation behavior of the maximum eigenvalue of the sum. Tail bounds for the norm of a sum of random rectangular matrices follow as an immediate corollary. The proof techniques also yield some information about matrix-valued martingales.In other words, this paper provides noncommutative generalizations of the classical bounds associated with the names Azuma, Bennett, Bernstein, Chernoff, Hoeffding, and McDiarmid. The matrix inequalities promise the same diversity of application, ease of use, and strength of conclusion that have made the scalar inequalities so valuable.

Subfields: Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Statistical Learning Theory

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In Applied Mathematics

  1. Ramon van Handel
  2. Stanislav Minsker
  3. Aaditya Ramdas
  4. Martin J. Wainwright
  5. Steven R. Howard
  6. Francis R. Bach
  7. Karim Lounici
  8. Tong Zhang

In Statistics and Probability

  1. Francis R. Bach
  2. Martin J. Wainwright
  3. Victor Chernozhukov
  4. Aaditya Ramdas
  5. Stefan Wager
  6. Robert Tibshirani
  7. Cun-Hui Zhang
  8. Bin Yu

In Statistical Learning Theory

  1. Francis R. Bach
  2. Tengyu Ma
  3. Tong Zhang
  4. Behnam Neyshabur
  5. Jason D. Lee
  6. Martin J. Wainwright
  7. Yuanzhi Li
  8. Nati Srebro

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