A shorter proof of Kanter’s Bessel function concentration bound

We give a shorter proof of Kanter’s (J. Multivariate Anal. 6, 222–236, 1976) sharp Bessel function bound for concentrations of sums of independent symmetric random vectors. We provide sharp upper bounds for the sum of modified Bessel functions I₀(x) + I₁(x), which might be of independent interest. Corollaries improve concentration or smoothness bounds for sums of independent random variables due to Čekanavičius & Roos (Lith. Math. J. 46, 54–91, 2006); Roos (Bernoulli, 11, 533–557, 2005), Barbour & Xia (ESAIM Probab. Stat. 3, 131–150, 1999), and Le Cam (Asymptotic Methods in Statistical Decision Theory. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, 1986).