Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2023 iii Paper 122 1 a Solution 2026-09-28
In an independent Bernoulli product space, an event is increasing if changing any coordinate from to cannot destroy it. Harris' inequality says that two increasing events satisfyEquivalently, two decreasing events are positively correlated.
For Janson inequalities, let be a random subset of a finite ground set whose elements are selected independently, let be fixed subsets, and putWrite when and , and define the ordered dependency sumThe first Janson inequality isThe usual extended form isThere is also the complementary lower boundand if for all , the product is at least .
For the proof, order arbitrarily and expose the avoidance events one at a time. The standard Janson sequential product lemma, obtained by conditioning and using Harris' inequality on the coordinates outside , givesUsing and summing the pair terms yields . If , this is at most . If , adjoin an independent Bernoulli coordinate of mean to each index and intersect with the event that its new coordinate is . The event implies that none of these thinned events occurs, while the thinned family has mean and dependency sum . Applying the first inequality in the enlarged product space givesFinally, the events are decreasing, so repeated Harris' inequality proves the product lower bound; gives its exponential version.