Related papers: A note on the coupon - collector's problem with mu…
We study exploration properties of a random walk on a network. For a fully connected network we find that the problem can be mapped to the well known coupon collector problem, thus allowing us to estimate form of $P(S,t)$: the distribution…
In many real life situations one has $m$ types of random events happening in chronological order within a time interval and one wishes to predict various milestones about these events or their subsets. An example is birdwatching. Suppose we…
We prove that, in the coupon collector's problem, the point processes given by the times of $r$-th arrivals for coupons of each type, centered and normalized in a proper way, converge toward a non-homogeneous Poisson point process. This…
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
The classic Coupon-Collector Problem (CCP) is generalized to the extent that each coupons serves certain "purposes". Only basic probability theory is used. Centerpiece rather is an algorithm that efficiently counts all $k$-element…
Optimal stopping problems give rise to random distributions describing how many applicants the decision-maker will sample or interview before choosing one, a quantity sometimes referred to as the search time or process duration. This…
In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…
We study how efficiently a $k$-element set $S\subseteq[n]$ can be learned from a uniform superposition $|S\rangle$ of its elements. One can think of $|S\rangle=\sum_{i\in S}|i\rangle/\sqrt{|S|}$ as the quantum version of a uniformly random…
This note describes an algorithm for enumerating all the elements in a finite set based on uniformly random sampling from the set. This algorithm can be used for enumeration by fair sampling with quantum annealing. Our algorithm is based on…
Let $V$ be an $n$-set, and let $X$ be a random variable taking values in the powerset of $V$. Suppose we are given a sequence of random coupons $X_1, X_2, \ldots $, where the $X_i$ are independent random variables with distribution given by…
We analyze a tandem network of polling queues with two product types and two stations. We assume that external arrivals to the network follow a Poisson process, and service times at each station are exponentially distributed. For this…
We study a pickup-and-delivery problem that arises when customers randomly submit requests over the course of a day from a choice of vendors on a collaborative e-commerce portal. Based on the attributes of a customer request, a dispatcher…
We study the coupon collector with deterministic expiration: one coupon is drawn at each time, and each coupon remains active for exactly $M$ draws. Completion occurs when all $n$ coupon types are simultaneously active. Equivalently, the…
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…
In this paper, we show how to use stochastic approximation to compute hitting time of a stochastic process, based on the study of the time for a fluid approximation of this process to be at distance 1/N of its fixed point. This approach is…
To develop decision rules regarding acceptance or rejection of production lots based on sample data is the purpose of acceptance sampling inspection plan. Dependent sampling procedures cumulate results from several preceding production lots…
This paper focuses on the Coupon Collector's Problem with replacement (limited purchasing of missing stickers) and swapping. We have simulated combined strategies and found new results, which we were able to prove for a particular case. The…
An {\it Omnibus Sequence} of length $n$ is one that has each possible "message" of length $k$ embedded in it as a subsequence. We study various properties of Omnibus Sequences in this paper, making connections, whenever possible, to the…
A typical polling system consists of a number of queues, attended by a single server in a fixed order. The vast majority of papers on polling systems focusses on Poisson arrivals, whereas very few results are available for general arrivals.…
The population protocol model describes collections of distributed agents that interact in pairs to solve a common task. We consider a dynamic variant of this prominent model, where we assume that an adversary may change the population size…