Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 108 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let denote the join of measurable partitions recording the first observations, and set , with . The entropy of a countable measurable partition is , using natural logarithms and . Null atoms can be discarded. Throughout, is a probability measure.
The stronger property needed for monotonicity of normalized block entropy is that its increments decrease. DefineSince conditioning reduces entropy, . The conditional entropy chain rule and measure preservation giveIt follows that , and consequentlyThis uses stationarity as well as the entropy chain rule; subadditivity alone would not establish monotonicity of every successive ratio.
The entropy rate of a measurable partition and the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy are, respectively,One may equivalently take the supremum over countable finite-entropy measurable partitions.
The Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theorem states that for a countable measurable partition with , the normalized informationconverges almost everywhere and in to a invariant function with integral . Here is the atom containing . If is an ergodic transformation, then almost everywhere. We prove the general form, including an explicit formula for its limit.
Let be the sigma-algebra generated by , let be trivial, and put . For every atom , the probabilitiesform a bounded conditional-expectation martingale. The martingale convergence theorem gives almost everywhere and in . Each of these probabilities is positive almost everywhere on : for example, integrating over the measurable set gives zero. Countability of lets us choose a common full-measure set for every atom.
The conditional information functionstherefore converge almost everywhere to . We need an integrable bound on this sequence; convergence of the probabilities alone would not supply one after taking logarithms. The allowed maximal inequality for conditional information functions gives, for ,Combining this with the bound by and the tail integral formula for moments yieldsThus , and the dominated convergence theorem gives in . In particular,because is the average of the decreasing sequence .
The information chain rule, applied from the final observation backwards, gives the exact identityIndeed, the symbol at time is conditioned on times ; pulling that conditional probability back by gives . Measure preservation is sufficient for this pullback identity.
We now prove the required triangular ergodic averaging lemma in this instance. Put . Then almost everywhere, , and . Split the difference between the displayed triangular sum and . Terms whose index is at least are bounded by . The remaining terms are at mostAfter division by , each of these finitely many end terms tends to zero almost everywhere by the linear growth bound for integrable observables proved in Question 1. Applying the Birkhoff ergodic theorem to , for every fixed , therefore givesThese conditional expectations decrease to zero almost everywhere: they decrease, and their integrals tend to zero. Letting , then applying the Birkhoff ergodic theorem to , proves
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 207 6 iv Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
The minimum exceeds exactly when both times exceed . By independence,Differentiating its survivor function givesThe tail integral formula for moments then givesEquivalently, integration by parts in gives . The assumed makes the boundary term vanish, since .
The stated tail condition does not itself guarantee a finite mean. For example, the proper survivor functionssatisfy , but their product behaves as , whose integral diverges. Thus the displayed expectation is valid as an extended nonnegative value; finiteness needs integrability of the product. The exponential distribution in the next part guarantees that finiteness.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 210 1 d Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
A centered random variable is sub-Gaussian with variance parameter whenThe Chernoff bound, applied to and , yieldsThe tail integral formula for moments and the substitution now give
Restricted mean survival time Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-07
The restricted mean survival time to a fixed cutoff is for a nonnegative event time. This follows by the tail integral formula for moments. Unlike the unrestricted mean, it uses no tail beyond ; under independent censoring it can be estimated by integrating a Kaplan–Meier estimator over adequately observed follow-up.
If has exponential distribution with expected value , the tail integral formula for moments gives and , where . At matching retained expected value, the excess variance under quota share reinsurance is .
Second moment bound from a clipped Gaussian tail Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
If for and , then . Indeed the tail integral formula for moments gives ; split at . Clipping at one improves the constant compared with integrating the exponential bound alone.