INSURANCE

The law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem in probability that describes the long-term stability of the mean of a random variable. Given a random variable with a finite expected value, if its values are repeatedly sampled, as the number of these observations increases, their mean will tend to approach and stay close to the expected value.

The LLN can easily be illustrated using the rolls of a die. That is, outcomes of a multinomial distribution in which the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are equally likely to be chosen. The population mean (or "expected value") of the outcomes is:

(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6) / 6 = 3,5.

The graph to the right plots the results of an experiment of rolls of a die. In this experiment we see that the average of die rolls deviates wildly at first. As predicted by LLN the average stabilizes around the expected value of 3.5 as the number of observations becomes large.

Another example is the flip of a coin. Given repeated flips of a fair coin, the frequency of heads (or tails) will increasingly approach 50% over a large number of trials. However it is possible that the absolute difference in the number of heads and tails will tend to get larger and larger as the number of flips increases. For example, we may see 520 heads after 1000 flips and 5096 heads after 10000 flips. While the average has moved from 0.52 to 0.5096, closer to the expected 50%, the total difference from the expected mean has increased from 20 to 96.

The LLN is important because it "guarantees" stable long-term results for random events. For example, while a casino may lose money in a single spin of the American roulette wheel, it will almost certainly gain very close to 5.3% of all gambled money over thousands of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. It is important to remember that the LLN only applies (as the name indicates) when a large number of observations are considered. There is no principle that a small number of observations will converge to the expected value or that a streak of one value will immediately be "balanced" by the others. See the Gambler's fallacy.

The LLN was first described by Jacob Bernoulli. It took him over 20 years to develop a sufficiently rigorous mathematical proof which was published in his Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecturing) in 1713. He named this his "Golden Theorem" but it became generally known as "Bernoulli's Theorem" (not to be confused with the Law in Physics with the same name.) In 1835, S.D. Poisson further described it under the name "La loi des grands nombres" ("The law of large numbers"). Thereafter, it was known under both names, but the "Law of large numbers" is most frequently used.

After Bernoulli and Poisson published their efforts, other mathematicians also contributed to refinement of the law, including Chebyshev, Markov, Borel, Cantelli and Kolmogorov. These further studies have given rise to two prominent forms of the LLN. One is called the "weak" law and the other the "strong" law. These forms do not describe different laws but instead refer to different ways of describing the mode of convergence of the cumulative sample means to the expected value, and the strong form implies the weak.