We give an extension of Hoeffding's inequality to the case of supermartingales with differences bounded from above. Our inequality strengthens or extends the inequalities of Freedman, Bernstein, Prohorov, Bennett and Nagaev.

An expansion of large deviation probabilities for martingales is given, which extends the classical result due to Cramér to the case of martingale differences satisfying the conditional Bernstein condition. The upper bound of the range of validity and the remainder of our expansion is the same as in the Cramér result and therefore are optimal. Our result implies a moderate deviation principle for martingales.

International audienceThe paper is devoted to establishing some general exponential inequalities for super-martingales. The inequalities improve or generalize many exponential inequalities of Bennett, Freedman, de la Peña, Pinelis and van de Geer. Moreover, our concentration inequalities also improve some known inequalities for sums of independent random variables. Applications associated with linear regressions, autoregressive processes and branching processes are provided. In particular, an interesting application of de la Peña's inequality to self-normalized deviations is also provided