Convergence of Random Variables

In probability theory, there exist several different notions of convergence of random variables. The convergence of sequences of random variables to some limit random variable is an important concept in probability theory, and its applications to statistics and stochastic processes. The same concepts are known in more general mathematics as stochastic convergence and they formalize the idea that a sequence of essentially random or unpredictable events can sometimes be expected to settle down into a behaviour that is essentially unchanging when items far enough into the sequence are studied. The different possible notions of convergence relate to how such a behaviour can be characterised: two readily understood behaviours are that the sequence eventually takes a constant value, and that values in the sequence continue to change but can be described by an unchanging probability distribution.

Read more about Convergence Of Random Variables:  Background, Convergence in Distribution, Convergence in Probability, Almost Sure Convergence, Sure Convergence, Convergence in Mean, Properties

Famous quotes containing the words random and/or variables:

    poor Felix Randal;
    How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
    When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
    Didst fettle for the great gray drayhorse his bright and battering
    sandal!
    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

    The variables are surprisingly few.... One can whip or be whipped; one can eat excrement or quaff urine; mouth and private part can be meet in this or that commerce. After which there is the gray of morning and the sour knowledge that things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)