Related papers: Notes on Feige's gumball machines problem

The paper is devoted to infinite Bernoulli convolutions generated by positive multigeometric series and to probability distributions of random variables whose digits in an even integer base-$s$ expansion with two redundant digits form a…

A collection of $n$ random events is said to be $(n - 1)$-wise independent if any $n - 1$ events among them are mutually independent. We characterise all probability measures with respect to which $n$ random events are $(n - 1)$-wise…

Let $\{\xi_1,\xi_2,\ldots\}$ be a sequence of independent random variables, and $\eta$ be a counting random variable independent of this sequence. In addition, let $S_0:=0$ and $S_n:=\xi_1+\xi_2+\cdots+\xi_n$ for $n\geqslant1$. We consider…

At each time $n\in\mathbb{N}$, let $\bar{Y}^{(n)}=(y_{1}^{(n)},y_{2}^{(n)},\cdots)$ be a random sequence of non-negative numbers that are ultimately zero in a random environment $\xi=(\xi_{n})_{n\in\mathbb{N}}$ in time, which satisfies for…

There are $n$ independent Bernoulli random variables $I_{k}$ with parameters $p_{k}$ that are observed sequentially. We consider a generalization of the Last-Success-Problem considering $w_{k}$ positive payments if the player successfully…

We prove that the distribution of the product of two correlated normal random variables with arbitrary means and arbitrary variances is infinitely divisible. We also obtain exact formulas for the probability density function of the sum of…

Random integers, sampled uniformly from $[1,x]$, share similarities with random permutations, sampled uniformly from $S_n$. These similarities include the Erd\H{o}s--Kac theorem on the distribution of the number of prime factors of a random…

We establish a lower bound on the entropy of weighted sums of (possibly dependent) random variables $(X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n)$ possessing a symmetric joint distribution. Our lower bound is in terms of the joint entropy of $(X_1, X_2, \dots,…

The blocking probability of a finite-source bufferless queue is a fixed point of the Engset formula, for which we prove existence and uniqueness. Numerically, the literature suggests a fixed point iteration. We show that such an iteration…

The tail of the distribution of a sum of a random number of independent and identically distributed nonnegative random variables depends on the tails of the number of terms and of the terms themselves. This situation is of interest in the…

Given $n$ positive integers $a_1,a_2,\dots,a_n$, and a positive integer right hand side $\beta$, we consider the feasibility version of the subset sum problem which is the problem of determining whether a subset of $a_1,a_2,\dots,a_n$ adds…

The Gumbel trick is a method to sample from a discrete probability distribution, or to estimate its normalizing partition function. The method relies on repeatedly applying a random perturbation to the distribution in a particular way, each…

We prove a limit theorem for the the maximal interpoint distance (also called the diameter) for a sample of n i.i.d. points in the unit ball of dimension 2 or more. The exact form of the limit distribution and the required normalisation are…

This paper proposes to unify fading distributions by modeling the magnitude-squared of the instantaneous channel gain as an infinitely divisible random variable. A random variable is said to be infinitely divisible, if it can be written as…

Let $a_n$ be the random increasing sequence of natural numbers which takes each value independently with probability $n^{-a}$, $0 < a < 1/2$, and let $p(n) = n^{1+\epsilon}$, $0 < \epsilon < 1$. We prove that, almost surely, for every…

In this article, we study the behavior of consecutive values of random completely multiplicative functions $(X_n)_{n \geq 1}$ whose values are i.i.d. at primes. We prove that for $X_2$ uniform on the unit circle, or uniform on the set of…

We speculate on the distribution of primes in exponentially growing, linear recurrence sequences $(u_n)_{n\geq 0}$ in the integers. By tweaking a heuristic which is successfully used to predict the number of prime values of polynomials, we…

This paper investigates what can be inferred about an arbitrary continuous probability distribution from a finite sample of $N$ observations drawn from it. The central finding is that the $N$ sorted sample points partition the real line…

The Goldbach conjecture states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. This conjecture was first proposed by German mathematician Christian Goldbach in 1742 and, despite being obviously true,…

Let $\a$ be a real-valued random variable of mean zero and variance 1. Let $M_n(\a)$ denote the $n \times n$ random matrix whose entries are iid copies of $\a$ and $\sigma_n(M_n(\a))$ denote the least singular value of $M_n(\a)$.…