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Concept
Tightness of measures
Summary
In mathematics, tightness is a concept in measure theory. The intuitive idea is that a given collection of measures does not "escape to infinity".
Let be a Hausdorff space, and let be a σ-algebra on that contains the topology . (Thus, every open subset of is a measurable set and is at least as fine as the Borel σ-algebra on .) Let be a collection of (possibly signed or complex) measures defined on . The collection is called tight (or sometimes uniformly tight) if, for any , there is a compact subset of such that, for all measures ,
where is the total variation measure of . Very often, the measures in question are probability measures, so the last part can be written as
If a tight collection consists of a single measure , then (depending upon the author) may either be said to be a tight measure or to be an inner regular measure.
If is an -valued random variable whose probability distribution on is a tight measure then is said to be a separable random variable or a Radon random variable.
If is a metrisable compact space, then every collection of (possibly complex) measures on is tight. This is not necessarily so for non-metrisable compact spaces. If we take with its order topology, then there exists a measure on it that is not inner regular. Therefore, the singleton is not tight.
If is a Polish space, then every probability measure on is tight. Furthermore, by Prokhorov's theorem, a collection of probability measures on is tight if and only if
it is precompact in the topology of weak convergence.
Consider the real line with its usual Borel topology. Let denote the Dirac measure, a unit mass at the point in . The collection
is not tight, since the compact subsets of are precisely the closed and bounded subsets, and any such set, since it is bounded, has -measure zero for large enough . On the other hand, the collection
is tight: the compact interval will work as for any . In general, a collection of Dirac delta measures on is tight if, and only if, the collection of their supports is bounded.
Official source
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