CONDITIONAL LARGE DEVIATIONS FOR 1-LATTICE DISTRIBUTIONS

The large deviations theorem of Cramer is extended to conditional probabilities in the following sense. Consider a random sample of pairs of random vectors and the sample means of each of the pairs. The probability that the first falls outside a certain convex set given that the second is fixed is shown to decrease with the sample size at an exponential rate which depends on the Kullback-Leibler distance between two distributions in an associated exponential familiy of distributions. Examples are given which include a method of computing the Bahadur exact slope for tests of certain composite hypotheses in exponential families.