Iterated Jackknives and Two-Sided Variance Inequalities

Abstract: We consider the variance of a function of $n$ independent random variables and provide new inequalities which, in particular, extend previous results obtained for symmetric functions in the i.i.d.~setting. For instance, we obtain various upper and lower variance bounds based on iterated jackknives statistics that can be considered as generalizations of the Efron-Stein inequality.