Randomized and Exchangeable Improvements of Markov's, Chebyshev's and Chernoff's Inequalities

Abstract

We present simple randomized and exchangeable improvements of Markov's inequality, as well as Chebyshev's inequality and Chernoff bounds. Our variants are never worse and typically strictly more powerful than the original inequalities. The proofs are short and elementary, and can easily yield similarly randomized or exchangeable versions of a host of other inequalities that employ Markov's inequality as an intermediate step. We point out some simple statistical applications involving tests that combine dependent e-values. In particular, we uniformly improve the power of universal inference, and obtain tighter betting-based nonparametric confidence intervals. Simulations reveal nontrivial gains in power (and no losses) in a variety of settings.