Type-II Error Bounds for Test Supermartingales from Lower-Tail Hypotheses

Abstract:In safe hypothesis testing with test supermartingals, Ville's inequality provides anytime-valid type-I error guarantees for every significance level $\alpha\in(0,1]$, if one rejects the null hypothesis whenever the wealth process first exceeds $\frac{1}{\alpha}$. Due to an inherent asymmetry, the type-II error does not have such guarantees: a heavy concentration of the probability on the lower tail of the log-increments can lead to one catastrophic bet that undoes any amount of accumulated evidence. This paper studies how different hypotheses on those lower-tail probabilities lead to different bounds on the type-II error of the sequential test. They all reduce to one master inequality, which bounds the type-II error at level $\alpha$, at a fixed horizon and sequentially, in terms of a one-sided Legendre transform of the (inverse-)moment generating function of the e-variables, evaluated at one number: the amount by which the lower bound of the accumulated e-powers exceeds $\log\frac{1}{\alpha}$. And, the step is lossless, in the sense, that it extracts exactly a constrained information projection. Every bound presented here is a corollary, obtained by a certain majorant of the above function. The hypotheses are: a finite negative moment; an exponentially small crash probability with a moment on the winning side; a wealth floor with a conditional variance, and its Bernstein variant, which interpolates between a Gaussian regime set by the variance and an exponential one set by the scale; a sub-Gaussian or bounded-tilt lower tail; bounded log-increments; and i.i.d. increments, where the majorant is the truth. We also provide an empirical-Bernstein variant. Each hypothesis may either be read as a condition on the e-variables one has, or as the price of betting with an approximation to the likelihood ratio rather than the ratio itself, which satisfies the weakest condition for free.

Statistics Theory (math.ST); Information Theory (cs.IT); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Probability (math.PR); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2609.27766 [math.ST]

(or arXiv:2609.27766v1 [math.ST] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27766 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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