Related papers: Omnibus Sequences, Coupon Collection, and Missing …
Let us call a sequence of numbers heapable if they can be sequentially inserted to form a binary tree with the heap property, where each insertion subsequent to the first occurs at a leaf of the tree, i.e. below a previously placed number.…
An $(n,R)$-covering sequence is a cyclic sequence whose consecutive $n$-tuples form a code of length $n$ and covering radius $R$. Using several construction methods improvements of the upper bounds on the length of such sequences for $n…
The Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) is a well-known combinatorial problem that seeks to estimate the number of random draws required to complete a collection of $n$ distinct coupon types. Various generalizations of this problem have been…
In this note we evaluate the expectation and variance of the waiting time to complete $m$ parallel collections of coupons, in the case of coupons which arrives independently, one by one and with equal probabilities.
We study universal compression of sequences generated by monotonic distributions. We show that for a monotonic distribution over an alphabet of size $k$, each probability parameter costs essentially $0.5 \log (n/k^3)$ bits, where $n$ is the…
An automatic sequence is a letter-to-letter coding of a fixed point of a uniform morphism. More generally, we have morphic sequences, which are letter-to-letter codings of fixed points of arbitrary morphisms. There are many examples where…
We study coverage processes in which each draw reveals a subset of $[n]$, and the goal is to determine the expected number of draws until all items are seen at least once. A classical example is the Coupon Collector's Problem, where each…
We examine the negative occupancy distribution and the coupon-collector distribution, both of which arise as distributions relating to hitting times in the extended occupancy problem. These distributions constitute a full solution to a…
A popular variant of the collector's problem is the following: Assume there are $N$ different types of coupons with equal occurring probabilities. There is one main collector who collects coupons. When she gets a "double," she gives it to…
A Sidon sequence is a sequence of integers a_1 < a_2 < a_3 < ... with the property that the sums a_i+a_j (i\le j) are distinct. This work contains a survey of Sidon sequences and their generalizations, and an extensive annotated and…
The predictability of a sequence is defined as the asymptotic performance of the best performing predictor in a given class. The value of the predictability of a sequence will in general depend on the choice of this predictor class. The…
An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is a set of permutations of $[n]$ such that each sequence of $k$ distinct elements of $[n]$ is a subsequence of at least one of the permutations. An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is perfect if there is a…
Given a sequence converging to zero, we consider the set of numbers which are sums of (infinite, finite, or empty) subsequences. When the original sequence is not absolutely summable, the subsum set is an unbounded closed interval which…
A {\it superpattern} is a string of characters of length $n$ that contains as a subsequence, and in a sense that depends on the context, all the smaller strings of length $k$ in a certain class. We prove structural and probabilistic results…
An avoidance pattern where the letters within an occurrence of which are required to be adjacent is referred to as a subword. In this paper, we enumerate members of the set NC_n of non-crossing partitions of length n according to the number…
Common meadows are commutative and associative algebraic structures with two operations (addition and multiplication) with additive and multiplicative identities and for which inverses are total. The inverse of zero is an error term…
We find generating functions the number of strings (words) containing a specified number of occurrences of certain types of order-isomorphic classes of substrings called subword patterns. In particular, we find generating functions for the…
We consider the longest common subsequence (LCS) problem with the restriction that the common subsequence is required to consist of at least $k$ length substrings. First, we show an $O(mn)$ time algorithm for the problem which gives a…
We show that various aspects of k-automatic sequences -- such as having an unbordered factor of length n -- are both decidable and effectively enumerable. As a consequence it follows that many related sequences are either k-automatic or…
We initiate the study of the Careless Coupon Collector's Problem (CCCP), a novel variation of the classical coupon collector, that we envision as a model for information systems such as web crawlers, dynamic caches, and fault-resilient…