Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Martingale Couplings And Bounds On Tails Of Probability Distributions, Kyle Luh

HMC Senior Theses

Wassily Hoeffding, in his 1963 paper, introduces a procedure to derive inequalities between distributions. This method relies on finding a martingale coupling between the two random variables. I have developed a construction that establishes such couplings in various urn models. I use this construction to prove the inequality between the hypergeometric and binomial random variables that appears in Hoeffding's paper. I have then used and extended my urn construction to create new inequalities.