Related papers: A note on last-success-problems

We consider the classic Kelly gambling problem with general distribution of outcomes, and an additional risk constraint that limits the probability of a drawdown of wealth to a given undesirable level. We develop a bound on the drawdown…

A result of Chebyshev (1864) and Hoeffding1956}, on bounding an expectation of a given function with respect to a Bernoulli convolution (also called Poisson binomial law, or law of the number of successes in independent trials) with any…

A run of all failures, a run of all successes, or complete separation in a logistic regression each tempts the analyst to declare a probability of exactly zero or one. The central message of this paper is that all three phenomena share a…

The exact lower bound on the probability of the occurrence of exactly one of $n$ random events each of probability $p$ is obtained.

There are many ways of establishing upper bounds on fluctuations of random variables, but there is no systematic approach for lower bounds. As a result, lower bounds are unknown in many important problems. This paper introduces a general…

We introduce a variant of the classic prophet inequality, called \emph{residual prophet inequality} (RPI). In the RPI problem, we consider a finite sequence of $n$ nonnegative independent random values with known distributions, and a known…

New lower bounds on the total variation distance between the distribution of a sum of independent Bernoulli random variables and the Poisson random variable (with the same mean) are derived via the Chen-Stein method. The new bounds rely on…

Let $P$ be a polynomial of degree $d$ in independent Bernoulli random variables which has zero mean and unit variance. The Bonami hypercontractivity bound implies that the probability that $|P| > t$ decays exponentially in $t^{2/d}$.…

Lionel Levine's hat challenge has $t$ players, each with a (very large, or infinite) stack of hats on their head, each hat independently colored at random black or white. The players are allowed to coordinate before the random colors are…

We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…

Bertrand et al. [1] (LMCS 2019) describe two-player zero-sum games in which one player tries to achieve a reachability objective in $n$ games (on the same finite arena) simultaneously by broadcasting actions, and where the opponent has full…

Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…

This note considers a variation of the full-information secretary problem where the random variables to be observed are independent and identically distributed. Consider $X_1,\dots,X_n$ to be an independent sequence of random variables, let…

Consider the sum $X(\xi)=\sum_{i=1}^n a_i\xi_i$, where $a=(a_i)_{i=1}^n$ is a sequence of non-zero reals and $\xi=(\xi_i)_{i=1}^n$ is a sequence of i.i.d. Rademacher random variables (that is, $\Pr[\xi_i=1]=\Pr[\xi_i=-1]=1/2$). The…

We give an elementary proof of the fact that a binomial random variable $X$ with parameters $n$ and $0.29/n \le p < 1$ with probability at least $1/4$ strictly exceeds its expectation. We also show that for $1/n \le p < 1 - 1/n$, $X$…

We present a new proof rule for verifying lower bounds on quantities of probabilistic programs. Our proof rule is not confined to almost-surely terminating programs -- as is the case for existing rules -- and can be used to establish…

Let $M_n$ denote a random symmetric $n \times n$ matrix whose upper diagonal entries are independent and identically distributed Bernoulli random variables (which take values $1$ and $-1$ with probability $1/2$ each). It is widely…

We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied…

In this note a two sided bound on the tail probability of sums of independent, and either symmetric or nonnegative, random variables is obtained. We utilize a recent result by Lata{\l}a on bounds on moments of such sums. We also give a new…

In theory, the probabilistic linkage method provides two distinct advantages over non-probabilistic methods, including minimal rates of linkage error and accurate measures of these rates for data users. However, implementations can fall…