Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)
Luis E. Ortiz, David McAllester
This paper gives distribution-free concentration inequalities for the miss- ing mass and the error rate of histogram rules. Negative association meth- ods can be used to reduce these concentration problems to concentration questions about independent sums. Although the sums are independent, they are highly heterogeneous. Such highly heterogeneous independent sums cannot be analyzed using standard concentration inequalities such as Hoeffding’s inequality, the Angluin-Valiant bound, Bernstein’s in- equality, Bennett’s inequality, or McDiarmid’s theorem.