Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
Consider a sequence U1, U2, · ·· of i.i.d. uniform (0, 1)-random variables. For fixed α ∈ (0, 1), let U(n, K) denote the [Kα]th order statistic of the subsample Un+1, · ··, Un+K, and set . Book and Truax (1976) proved the following analogue of the Erdös-Rényi (1970) strong law of large numbers: for α < u < 1 and C = C(α, u) such that −1/C = αlog(u/α)+ (1 – α)log((l – u)/(1 –α)), it holds almost surely that In view of the Deheuvels–Devroye (1983) improvements of the original Erdös-Rényi law, we determine the lim inf and lim sup of where K = [C log N]. This improves (∗), showing that it holds with a best-possible convergence rate of order O(log log N/log N). Using the quantile transformation the result can be extended to a general i.i.d. sequence X1, X2, · ·· with d.f. F satisfying a strict monotonicity condition.