Related papers: A Generalized Coupon Collector Problem
A team consisting of an unknown number of mobile agents, starting from different nodes of an unknown network, possibly at different times, have to meet at the same node. Agents are anonymous (identical), execute the same deterministic…
We consider the problem of estimating the number of types in a corpus using the number of types observed in a sample of tokens from that corpus. We derive exact and asymptotic distributions for the number of observed types, conditioned upon…
Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes…
In the standard formulation of the occupancy problem one considers the distribution of r balls in n cells, with each ball assigned independently to a given cell with probability 1/n. Although closed form expressions can be given for the…
The change-making problem asks: given a positive integer $v$ and a collection $C$ of integer coin values $c_1=1<c_2< c_3< \cdots< c_n$, what is the minimum number of coins needed to represent $v$ with coin values from $C$? For some coin…
A simple method to produce a random order type is to take the order type of a random point set. We conjecture that many probability distributions on order types defined in this way are heavily concentrated and therefore sample inefficiently…
Given a discrete distribution, an interesting problem is to determine the minimum size of a random sample drawn from this distribution, in order to observe a given number of different records. This problem is related with many applied…
We study a generalization of deduplication, which enables lossless deduplication of highly similar data and show that standard deduplication with fixed chunk length is a special case. We provide bounds on the expected length of coded…
Let $G$ be a finite group generated by $k$ elements. The well-known product replacement algorithm provides an effective method for sampling generating sets of $G$. We study a refinement of this algorithm that is designed to output…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
Let $(\{1,2,\ldots,n\},d)$ be a metric space. We analyze the expected value and the variance of $\sum_{i=1}^{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}\,d({\boldsymbol{\pi}}(2i-1),{\boldsymbol{\pi}}(2i))$ for a uniformly random permutation ${\boldsymbol{\pi}}$ of…
Itai and Rodeh showed that, on the average, the communication of a leader election algorithm takes no more than $LN$ bits, where $L \simeq 2.441716$ and $N$ denotes the size of the ring. We give a precise asymptotic analysis of the average…
In "Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence", Gilbert and Mosteller analyze a full information game where n measurements from an uniform distribution are drawn and a player (knowing n) must decide at each draw whether or not to choose that…
We develop a new approach for uniform generation of combinatorial objects, and apply it to derive a uniform sampler REG for d-regular graphs. REG can be implemented such that each graph is generated in expected time O(nd^3), provided that…
We consider a decentralized graph coloring model where each vertex only knows its own color and whether some neighbor has the same color as it. The networking community has studied this model extensively due to its applications to channel…
This paper gives two sharp bounds for the generalized ballot problem with candidate A receiving at least \mu times as candidate B for an arbitrary real number \mu.
We study three nonmonotone coupon-collector models through a stationary-entry viewpoint. In such models the all-present state is not absorbing, so completion is governed not by the disappearance of a monotone terminal cloud but by rare new…
The area of sublinear algorithms have recently received a lot of attention. In this setting, one has to choose specific access model for the input, as the algorithm does not have time to pre-process or even to see the whole input. A…
We introduce an algorithm for the uniform generation of infinite traces, i.e., infinite words up to commutation of some letters. The algorithm outputs on-the-fly approximations of a theoretical infinite trace, the latter being distributed…
For each fixed $d\ge 1$, we obtain asymptotic estimates for the number of $d$-representable simplicial complexes on $n$ vertices as a function of $n$. The case $d=1$ corresponds to counting interval graphs, and we obtain new results in this…