Thursday, March 18, 1993
04:30 PM in MATH 175
Prem S. Puri Memorial Lecture
Yuan Shih Chow, Professor of Statistics, Department of Mathematical Statistics, Columbia University, New York, NY

Wald's Equation for A Class of Denormalized U-statistics

Abstract

For any integer k ≤ 1, define the de-normalized U-statistic Sk,n= ∑1 ≤ i1 < ... < ik ≤ n Xi1...Xik where {X, Xn, n ≥1} is an i.i.d. sequence with EX = 0. It is proved for k ≥ 2 that ESk,T = 0 whenever ElXlp < ∞, 1 < p ≤ 2 and T is a stopping time with E T(h-1)/(p-1)< ∞. This Wald-type equation is used to elicit information about the moments of Tk = inf{n ≥ k : Sk,n ≥ 0) and Wc = inf{n ≥ 2 : S1,n2 ≥ c ∑j=1nXj2}, c > 0. It is also noted that E|Sk, n/nk/p|p → 0 if E|X|p < ∞, O < p < 2 provided EX = 0 when 1 ≤ p < 2.