ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Weak convergence of measures

Okay, let me try to explain "weak convergence of measures" in a way that a 5-year-old can understand.

Imagine you have a bag of candy. Each piece of candy is a different color, and you want to know which colors are the most common. To figure this out, you can count how many candies of each color you have.

Now imagine you have two bags of candy. Bag A has more red candies than Bag B, but Bag B has more blue candies than Bag A. How do you compare the two bags?

One way to do this is to look at the proportion of each color in each bag. For example, if Bag A has 10 red candies and 20 total candies, then the proportion of red candies in Bag A is 10/20 = 0.5. Similarly, if Bag B has 5 blue candies and 15 total candies, then the proportion of blue candies in Bag B is 5/15 = 0.33.

You can think of a "measure" as a way to count the candies in each bag. Instead of counting the number of candies of each color, a measure might count the weight or volume of the candies. But the idea is the same: it's a way to describe how many candies of each type there are.

"Convergence" means that the bags of candy are becoming more similar to each other. In math terms, it means that the measures of the bags are getting closer and closer to each other.

"Weak" convergence means that we are only looking at a small part of the candy bag at a time. For example, suppose you only care about the proportion of red candies in each bag. Weak convergence means that as you look at smaller and smaller subsets of each bag (like only looking at the first 10 candies in each bag), the proportions of red candies in each subset become more similar.

So to summarize: weak convergence of measures is like comparing two bags of candy by looking at the proportion of each color in the bag, but only looking at a small part of each bag at a time. It tells us how similar the two bags are becoming as we look at smaller and smaller parts of them.