Volume 16 (2020) Article 17 pp. 1-29

Concentration for Limited Independence via Inequalities for the Elementary Symmetric Polynomials

by Parikshit Gopalan and Amir Yehudayoff

Received: October 8, 2015
Revised: August 30, 2020
Published: December 24, 2020

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We study the extent of independence needed to approximate the product of bounded random variables in expectation. This natural question has applications in pseudorandomness and min-wise independent hashing.

For random variables with absolute value bounded by $1$, we give an error bound of the form $\sigma^{\Omega(k)}$ when the input is $k$-wise independent and $\sigma^2$ is the variance of their sum. Previously, known bounds only applied in more restricted settings, and were quantitively weaker. Our proof relies on a new analytic inequality for the elementary symmetric polynomials $S_k(x)$ for $x \in \R^n$. We show that if $|S_k(x)|,|S_{k+1}(x)|$ are small relative to $|S_{k-1}(x)|$ for some $k> 0$ then $|S_\ell(x)|$ is also small for all $\ell > k$. We use this to give a simpler and more modular analysis of a construction of min-wise independent hash functions and pseudorandom generators for combinatorial rectangles due to Gopalan et al., which also improves the overall seed-length.

DOI: 10.4086/toc.2020.v016a017

© 2020 Parikshit Gopalan and Amir Yehudayoff
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)