Related papers: Statistical Curse of the Second Half Rank
Let $M$ be a random $m \times n$ matrix with binary entries and i.i.d. rows. The weight (i.e., number of ones) of a row has a specified probability distribution, with the row chosen uniformly at random given its weight. Let $N(n,m)$ denote…
In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…
We study an elementary two-player card game where in each round players compare cards and the holder of the smallest card wins. Using the rate equations approach, we treat the stochastic version of the game in which cards are drawn…
We consider a biological population in which a beneficial mutation is undergoing a selective sweep when a second beneficial mutation arises at a linked locus and we investigate the probability that both mutations will eventually fix in the…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
Today, there is no clear legal test for regulating the use of variables that proxy for race and other protected classes and classifications. This Article develops such a test. Decision tools that use proxies are narrowly tailored when they…
We propose an algorithm named best-scored random forest for binary classification problems. The terminology "best-scored" means to select the one with the best empirical performance out of a certain number of purely random tree candidates…
Rank-ordering statistics provides a perspective on the rare, largest elements of a population, whereas the statistics of cumulative distributions are dominated by the more numerous small events. The exponent of a power law distribution can…
We provide scientific foundations for athletic performance prediction on an individual level, exposing the phenomenology of individual athletic running performance in the form of a low-rank model dominated by an individual power law. We…
We study a rank based univariate two-sample distribution-free test. The test statistic is the difference between the average of between-group rank distances and the average of within-group rank distances. This test statistic is closely…
Given an undirected graph representing similarities between a set of items and an additive measure evaluating the items, we treat the position of a special subset of items in an ordinal ranking through a collection of combinatorial…
This article improves the existing proven rates of regret decay in optimal policy estimation. We give a margin-free result showing that the regret decay for estimating a within-class optimal policy is second-order for empirical risk…
Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and…
This document is due to appear as a chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) edited by S. Sisson, Y. Fan, and M. Beaumont. Since the earliest work on ABC, it has been recognised that using summary…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
We study the effects of academic rank using data on the entire population of children enrolled in primary schools in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1962. Exploiting quasi-random variation in peer group composition, we estimate the causal impact of…
Low rank inference on matrices is widely conducted by optimizing a cost function augmented with a penalty proportional to the nuclear norm $\Vert \cdot \Vert_*$. However, despite the assortment of computational methods for such problems,…
Competition between a complex system's constituents and a corresponding reward mechanism based on it have profound influence on the functioning, stability, and evolution of the system. But determining the dominance hierarchy or ranking…
Schools with the highest average student performance are often the smallest schools; localities with the highest rates of some cancers are frequently small and the effects observed in clinical trials are likely to be largest for the…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…