Related papers: Quicksort Is Optimal For Many Equal Keys

We study the fundamental problem of guessing cryptographic keys, drawn from some non-uniform probability distribution $D$, as e.g. in LPN, LWE or for passwords. The optimal classical algorithm enumerates keys in decreasing order of…

Clustering is a classic topic in optimization with $k$-means being one of the most fundamental such problems. In the absence of any restrictions on the input, the best known algorithm for $k$-means with a provable guarantee is a simple…

We prove that \Omega(n log(n)) comparisons are necessary for any quantum algorithm that sorts n numbers with high success probability and uses only comparisons. If no error is allowed, at least 0.110nlog_2(n) - 0.067n + O(1) comparisons…

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…

Suppose that $\ff \in \reals^{n}$ is a vector of $n$ error-contaminated measurements of $n$ smooth values measured at distinct and strictly ascending abscissae. The following projective technique is proposed for obtaining a vector of smooth…

The Random K-Satisfiability Problem, consisting in verifying the existence of an assignment of N Boolean variables that satisfy a set of M=alpha N random logical clauses containing K variables each, is studied using the replica symmetric…

The element distinctness problem takes as input a list $I$ of $n$ values from a totally ordered universe and the goal is to decide whether $I$ contains any duplicates. It is a well-studied problem with a classical worst-case $\Omega(n \log…

Randomized algorithms and data structures are often analyzed under the assumption of access to a perfect source of randomness. The most fundamental metric used to measure how "random" a hash function or a random number generator is, is its…

Factor Analysis (FA) is a technique of fundamental importance that is widely used in classical and modern multivariate statistics, psychometrics and econometrics. In this paper, we revisit the classical rank-constrained FA problem, which…

We consider the problem of summarizing a multi set of elements in $\{1, 2, \ldots , n\}$ under the constraint that no element appears more than $\ell$ times. The goal is then to answer \emph{rank} queries --- given $i\in\{1, 2, \ldots ,…

We prove an exponential decay concentration inequality to bound the tail probability of the difference between the log-likelihood of discrete random variables on a finite alphabet and the negative entropy. The concentration bound we derive…

This paper investigates the approximability of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem. The fastest algorithm for solving the LCS problem exactly runs in essentially quadratic time in the length of the input, and it is known that under…

We prove a tight upper bound on the variance of the priority sampling method (aka sequential Poisson sampling). Our proof is significantly shorter and simpler than the original proof given by Mario Szegedy at STOC 2006, which resolved a…

The $k$-means++ algorithm of Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) is often the practitioners' choice algorithm for optimizing the popular $k$-means clustering objective and is known to give an $O(\log k)$-approximation in expectation. To…

We present a general approach to the problem of determining the asymptotic order of the variance of the optimal score between two independent random sequences defined over an arbitrary finite alphabet. Our general approach is based on…

Let $ k,l \geq 2$ be natural numbers, and let $d_k,d_l$ denote the $k$-fold and $l$-fold divisor functions, respectively. We analyse the asymptotic behavior of the sum $\sum_{x<n\leq x+H_1}d_k(n)d_l(n+h)$. More precisely, let…

Huffman coding finds a prefix code that minimizes mean codeword length for a given probability distribution over a finite number of items. Campbell generalized the Huffman problem to a family of problems in which the goal is to minimize not…

Modern comparison sorts like quicksort suffer from performance inconsistencies due to suboptimal pivot selection, leading to $(O(N^2))$ worst-case complexity, while in-place merge sort variants face challenges with data movement overhead.…

In this paper we describe a new algorithm called Fast Adaptive Sequencing Technique (FAST) for maximizing a monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint $k$ whose approximation ratio is arbitrarily close to $1-1/e$, is…

We analyze the convergence rates of stochastic gradient algorithms for smooth finite-sum minimax optimization and show that, for many such algorithms, sampling the data points without replacement leads to faster convergence compared to…