Proof of the Strong Law of Large Numbers

Preliminaries

Kronecker's Lemma. Let be a sequence of real numbers such that

Then, for any such that and , we have

Proof. Define . Then,

Kolmogorov's Maximal Inequality. Let be a sequence of independent random variables with zero expectations and finite variances, and define . Then, for any ,

Proof. Let (with the convention that ). Then,

Khinchine-Kolmogorov Convergence Theorem. Let be a sequence of independent random variables with zero expectations and finite variances. If , then the series converges almost surely.

Proof. For any and any , pick such that . For any , Kolmogorov's maximal inequality implies that

Then, apply the continuity of probability measure to get

Since

for any , we have

This means that, for any , we can find such that the tail sums are uniformly bounded by with probability at least . Hence, for almost all in the probability space , we can find such that the tail sums after are uniformly bounded by .

Formally, there exists a 1-measure set such that, for any ,

Let

Then is also a 1-measure set, and for any and any , it holds that

Hence converges by the Cauchy criterion. Therefore, converges almost surely.

Strong Law of Large Numbers

Theorem Statement

The Strong Law of Large Numbers (SLLN). Let be a sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables with finite expectation . Define , then almost surely.

Decomposition

Let

Evidently, . If we can show that and , then follows.

Proving

Since are independent with zero expectations and finite variances, if we can show that

then

converges almost surely by the Khinchine-Kolmogorov convergence theorem. Then, Kronecker's lemma implies that

where .

Now we show that :

This completes the proof that .

Proving

First, note that

By the Borel-Cantelli lemma, we have

Hence, for almost all in the probability space , there exists only finite many such that . Consequently,

Lastly, Dominated Convergence Theorem implies that

Combining the two results above, we conclude that .