Related papers: A note on last-success-problems

Recently noticed ability of restart to reduce the expected completion time of first-passage processes allows appealing opportunities for performance improvement in a variety of settings. However, complex stochastic processes often exhibit…

Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…

Let $n$ be a large integer and $M_n$ be a random $n$ by $n$ matrix whose entries are i.i.d. Bernoulli random variables (each entry is $\pm 1$ with probability 1/2). We show that the probability that $M_n$ is singular is at most $(3/4…

A collection of $n$ random events is said to be $(n - 1)$-wise independent if any $n - 1$ events among them are mutually independent. We characterise all probability measures with respect to which $n$ random events are $(n - 1)$-wise…

In this note, we prove a tight lower bound on the joint entropy of $n$ unbiased Bernoulli random variables which are $n/2$-wise independent. For general $k$-wise independence, we give new lower bounds by adapting Navon and Samorodnitsky's…

We consider extensive form win-lose games over a complete binary-tree of depth $n$ where players act in an alternating manner. We study arguably the simplest random structure of payoffs over such games where 0/1 payoffs in the leafs are…

Let $X$ be a random variable distributed according to the binomial distribution with parameters $n$ and $p$. It is shown that $P(X>EX)\ge1/4$ if $1>p\ge c/n$, where $c:=\ln(4/3)$, the best possible constant factor.

Known Bernstein-type upper bounds on the tail probabilities for sums of independent zero-mean sub-exponential random variables are improved in several ways at once. The new upper bounds have a certain optimality property.

A well-known discovery of Feige's is the following: Let $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ be nonnegative independent random variables, with $\mathbb{E}[X_i] \leq 1 \;\forall i$, and let $X = \sum_{i=1}^n X_i$. Then for any $n$, \[\Pr[X < \mathbb{E}[X] +…

The Josephus problem is a well--studied elimination problem consisting in determining the position of the survivor after repeated applications of a deterministic rule removing one person at a time from a given group. A natural probabilistic…

It is well known that there is no direct one-to-one relation between $p$-values and likelihood ratios or Bayes factors, since their relation crucially involves the sample size $n$. We investigate their (asymptotic) relation in a…

In this paper we consider the problem of binary hypothesis testing with finite memory systems. Let $X_1,X_2,\ldots$ be a sequence of independent identically distributed Bernoulli random variables, with expectation $p$ under $\mathcal{H}_0$…

A reformulation of the Kelly Criterion is presented. Let $\mathfrak{G}$ be a generic stochastic Bernoulli binary game with outcomes $\mathscr{Z}(I)\in\lbrace -1,1\rbrace$ of N trials for $I=1...N$. The binomial probabilities are…

We give a detailed proof, in the identically distributed case, of a conjecture of Feige about the maximum probability that the sum of n independent non-negative integer valued random variables, each of mean 1, exceeds n. The general case is…

Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…

Assume that one aims to simulate an event of unknown probability $s\in (0,1)$ which is uniquely determined, however only its approximations can be obtained using a finite computational effort. Such settings are often encountered in…

The existential k-pebble game characterizes the expressive power of the existential-positive k-variable fragment of first-order logic on finite structures. The winner of the existential k-pebble game on two given finite structures can be…

In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…

We give a new bound on the probability that the random sum $\xi_1 v_1 +...+ \xi_n v_n$ belongs to a ball of fixed radius, where the $\xi_i$ are iid Bernoulli random variables and the $v_i$ are vectors in $\R^d$. As an application, we prove…

The algorithmic theory of randomness is well developed when the underlying space is the set of finite or infinite sequences and the underlying probability distribution is the uniform distribution or a computable distribution. These…