Concentration from Product Moments via an Additional Element of Randomness

Abstract

The standard method of exponential moments for proving concentration bounds can often be replaced by an argument based on elementary symmetric polynomials. We introduce an additional element of randomness into this framework, which reduces the problem to bounding product moments over a uniformly sampled set of indices. We show that this approach gives useful bounds in three settings. For read-$Δ$ families under limited independence, we obtain bounds governed by the degrees of randomly induced dependency subgraphs, improving the dependence on worst-case degrees. For random binary linear hashing with (semi-)random inputs, we derive fixed-bin and maximum-load bounds by controlling the rank defect of random tuples of input keys. Finally, for stochastic processes, we show how decay of product moments yields concentration bounds, recovering the spectral and mixing-time scales for finite-state Markov chains.