Related papers: The logarithmic Zipf version of the coupon collect…
In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…
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 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 explore a probabilistic model of an artistic text: words of the text are chosen independently of each other in accordance with a discrete probability distribution on an infinite dictionary. The words are enumerated 1, 2, $\ldots$, and…
Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample $x$ itself is…
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…
Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ belongs to some class of distributions $\mathcal{C}$ versus $p$ being far from every distribution in $\mathcal{C}$? This fundamental question has…
This paper formalizes a latent variable inference problem we call {\em supervised pattern discovery}, the goal of which is to find sets of observations that belong to a single ``pattern.'' We discuss two versions of the problem and prove…
We study the problem of generating a random variate $X$ from a finite discrete probability distribution $P$ using an entropy source of independent fair coin flips. A classic result from Knuth and Yao shows that the optimal expected number…
The takeoff point for this paper is the voluminous body of literature addressing recursive betting games with expected logarithmic growth of wealth being the performance criterion. Whereas almost all existing papers involve use of linear…
A random vector $X$ with representation $X=\sum_{j\geq0}A_jZ_j$ is considered. Here, $(Z_j)$ is a sequence of independent and identically distributed random vectors and $(A_j)$ is a sequence of random matrices, `predictable' with respect to…
We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf's rank analysis, Simon's model is presented in a mathematically elementary…
In the "correlated sampling" problem, two players are given probability distributions $P$ and $Q$, respectively, over the same finite set, with access to shared randomness. Without any communication, the two players are each required to…
We investigate a problem in which each member of a group of learners is trained separately to solve the same classification task. Each learner has access to a training dataset (possibly with overlap across learners) but each trained…
Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…
In this paper, we prove that the numerical-semigroup-gap counting problem is #NP-complete as a main theorem. A numerical semigroup is an additive semigroup over the set of all nonnegative integers. A gap of a numerical semigroup is defined…
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…
We treat a random number generation from an i.i.d. probability distribution of $P$ to that of $Q$. When $Q$ or $P$ is a uniform distribution, the problems have been well-known as the uniform random number generation and the resolvability…
Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…
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…