Sequential complexities and uniform martingale laws of large numbers

Abstract

We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a uniform martingale Law of Large Numbers. We extend the technique of symmetrization to the case of dependent random variables and provide “sequential” (non-i.i.d.) analogues of various classical measures of complexity, such as covering numbers and combinatorial dimensions from empirical process theory. We establish relationships between these various sequential complexity measures and show that they provide a tight control on the uniform convergence rates for empirical processes with dependent data. As a direct application of our results, we provide exponential inequalities for sums of martingale differences in Banach spaces.