Chebyshev's inequality

This article is not about Chebyshev's sum inequality.

In probability theory, Chebyshev's inequality (also known as Tchebysheff's inequality, Chebyshev's theorem, or the Bienaymé-Chebyshev inequality), named after Pafnuty Chebyshev, who first proved it, states that in any data sample or probability distribution, nearly all the values are close to the mean value, and provides a quantitative description of "nearly all" and "close to". For example, no more than 1/4 of the values are more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean, no more than 1/9 are more than 3 standard deviations away, no more than 1/25 are more than 5 standard deviations away, and so on.

General statement

The inequality can be stated quite generally using measure theory; the statement in the language of probability theory then follows as a particular case, for a space of measure 1.

Measure-theoretic statement

Let (X,Σ,μ) be a measure space, and let f be an extended real-valued measurable function defined on X. Then for any real number t > 0,

\mu(\{x\in X|\,|f(x)|\geq t\}) \leq {1\over t^2} \int_X f^2 \, d\mu.

More generally, if g is a nonnegative extended real-valued measurable function, nondecreasing on the range of f, then

\mu(\{x\in X|\,f(x)\geq t\} \leq {1\over g(t)} \int_X g\circ f\, d\mu.

The previous statement then follows by defining g(t) as

g(t)=\begin{cases}t^2&\mbox{if }t\geq0\\0&\mbox{otherwise,}\end{cases}

and taking |f| instead of f.

Probabilistic statement

Let X be a random variable with expected value μ and finite variance σ². Then for any real number k > 0,

\Pr(\left|X-\mu\right|\geq k\sigma)\leq\frac{1}{k^2}.

Only the cases k > 1 provide useful information.

As an example, using k=√2 shows that at least half of the values lie in the interval (μ − √2 σ, μ + √2 σ).

Typically, the theorem will provide rather loose bounds. However, the bounds provided by Chebyshev's inequality cannot, in general (remaining sound for variables of arbitrary distribution), be improved upon. For example, for any k > 1, the following example (where σ = 1/k) meets the bounds exactly.

\begin{matrix}\Pr(X=-1) & = & 1/2k^2 \\ \\ \Pr(X=0) & = & 1 - 1/k^2 \\ \\ \Pr(X=1) & = & 1/2k^2 \end{matrix}

The theorem can be useful despite loose bounds because it applies to random variables of any distribution, and because these bounds can be calculated knowing no more about the distribution than the mean and variance.

Chebyshev's inequality is used for proving the weak law of large numbers.

Example application

For illustration, assume we have a large body of text, for example articles from a publication. Assume we know that the articles are on average 1000 characters long with a standard deviation of 200 characters. From Chebyshev's inequality we can then deduce that at least 75% of the articles have a length between 600 and 1400 characters (k = 2).

Variants

A one-tailed variant with k > 0, is

\Pr(X-\mu \geq k\sigma)\leq\frac{1}{1+k^2}.

A stronger result applicable to unimodal probability distributions is the Vysochanskiï-Petunin inequality.

Proof

Measure-theoretic proof

Let A_t be defined as A_t = {x ∈ X | f(x) ≥ t}, and let

1_{A_t}

be the indicator function of the set A_t. Then, it is easy to check that

0\leq g(t)1_{A_t}\leq g\circ f\,1_{A_t}\leq g\circ f,

and therefore,

g(t)\mu(A_t)=\int_X g(t)1_{A_t}\,d\mu\leq\int_{A_t} g\circ f\,d\mu\leq\int_X g\circ f\,d\mu.

The desired inequality follows from dividing the above inequality by g(t).

Probabilistic proof

Markov's inequality states that for any real-valued random variable Y and any positive number a, we have Pr(|Y| > a) ≤ E(|Y|)/a. One way to prove Chebyshev's inequality is to apply Markov's inequality to the random variable Y = (X − μ)² with a = (σk)².

It can also be proved directly. For any event A, let I_A be the indicator random variable of A, i.e. I_A equals 1 if A occurs and 0 otherwise. Then

\Pr(|X-\mu| \geq k\sigma) = \operatorname{E}(I_{|X-\mu| \geq k\sigma})

= \operatorname{E}(I_{^*^2 \geq 1})

\leq \operatorname{E}\left( \left( {X-\mu \over k\sigma} \right)^2 \right)

= {1 \over k^2} {\operatorname{E}((X-\mu)^2) \over \sigma^2} = {1 \over k^2}.

The direct proof shows why the bounds are quite loose in typical cases: the number 1 to the left of "≥" is replaced by ^*² to the right of "≥" whenever the latter exceeds 1. In some cases it exceeds 1 by a very wide margin.

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