Burdzy–Pitman conjecture on the maximal spread of independent coherent distributions

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Let (Ω,F,P)(\Omega, \mathcal{F}, \mathbb{P}) be a probability space. A random vector (X,Y)(X,Y) is coherent if there exist sub-σ\sigma-fields G,H⊂F\mathcal{G},\mathcal{H}\subset\mathcal{F} and an event A∈FA\in\mathcal{F} such that

X=E(1A∣G),Y=E(1A∣H).X=\mathbb{E}(\mathbb{1}_A\mid\mathcal{G}),\qquad Y=\mathbb{E}(\mathbb{1}_A\mid\mathcal{H}).

Let C\mathcal{C} denote the class of coherent random vectors, and define

CI={(X,Y):X,Y∈C, X⊥Y}.\mathcal{C}_{\mathcal{I}}=\{(X,Y):X,Y\in\mathcal{C},\ X\perp Y\}.

Burdzy–Pitman conjecture. For every δ∈(12,1]\delta\in(\frac{1}{2},1],

sup⁡(X,Y)∈CIP(∣X−Y∣≥δ)=2δ(1−δ).\sup_{(X,Y)\in\mathcal{C}_{\mathcal{I}}}\mathbb{P}(|X-Y|\geq\delta)=2\delta(1-\delta).

Burdzy and Pitman posed this as the sharp bound for the probability that independent coherent variables differ by at least a given threshold. The paper states that its combinatorial and probabilistic results confirm the conjecture, so the conjecture is solved.

References

Primary source

Stanisław Cichomski and Fedor Petrov, “A combinatorial proof of the Burdzy-Pitman conjecture”, arXiv:2204.07219 (2022).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2020–2022). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2007.08022.

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