Related papers: With or without replacement? Sampling uncertainty …
We consider finite element approximations of ill-posed elliptic problems with conditional stability. The notion of {\emph{optimal error estimates}} is defined including both convergence with respect to mesh parameter and perturbations in…
We study the selection problem, namely that of computing the $i$th order statistic of $n$ given elements. Here we offer a data structure called \emph{selectable sloppy heap} handling a dynamic version in which upon request: (i)~a new…
The Erd\H{o}s discrepancy problem, now a theorem by T. Tao, asks whether every sequence with values plus or minus one has unbounded discrepancy along all homogeneous arithmetic progressions. We establish weighted variants of this problem,…
Convex sample approximations of chance-constrained optimization problems are considered, in which chance constraints are replaced by sets of sampled constraints. We propose a randomized sample selection strategy that allows tight bounds to…
An urn contains black and red balls. Let $Z_n$ be the proportion of black balls at time $n$ and $0\leq L<U\leq 1$ random barriers. At each time $n$, a ball $b_n$ is drawn. If $b_n$ is black and $Z_{n-1}<U$, then $b_n$ is replaced together…
We study an optimal stopping problem with an unbounded, time-dependent and discontinuous reward function. This problem is motivated by the pricing of a variable annuity contract with guaranteed minimum maturity benefit, under the assumption…
The well-known Gumbel-Max trick for sampling from a categorical distribution can be extended to sample $k$ elements without replacement. We show how to implicitly apply this 'Gumbel-Top-$k$' trick on a factorized distribution over…
Various strategies for active learning have been proposed in the machine learning literature. In uncertainty sampling, which is among the most popular approaches, the active learner sequentially queries the label of those instances for…
We study a generalization of the classical median finding problem to batched query case: given an array of unsorted $n$ items and $k$ (not necessarily disjoint) intervals in the array, the goal is to determine the median in {\em each} of…
We propose a general framework for studying optimal impulse control problem in the presence of uncertainty on the parameters. Given a prior on the distribution of the unknown parameters, we explain how it should evolve according to the…
A wide variety of optimization techniques, both exact and heuristic, tend to be biased samplers. This means that when attempting to find multiple uncorrelated solutions of a degenerate Boolean optimization problem a subset of the solution…
In this paper, we consider a new type of urn scheme, where the selection probabilities are proportional to a weight function, which is linear but decreasing in the proportion of existing colours. We refer to it as the \emph{negatively…
We study an urn process containing red and blue balls and two different strategies to reinforce the urn. Namely, a generalized P\'olya-type strategy versus an i.i.d. one. At each step, one of the two reinforcement strategies is chosen by…
We are lifting classical problems from single instances to regular sets of instances. The task of finding a positive instance of the combinatorial problem $P$ in a potentially infinite given regular set is equivalent to the so called…
When the target of statistical inference is chosen in a data-driven manner, the guarantees provided by classical theories vanish. We propose a solution to the problem of inference after selection by building on the framework of algorithmic…
We consider selecting the top-$m$ alternatives from a finite number of alternatives via Monte Carlo simulation. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, and develop a…
We study an infinite-horizon discrete-time optimal stopping problem under non-exponential discounting. A new method, which we call the iterative approach, is developed to find subgame perfect Nash equilibria. When the discount function…
Due to a lack of coherent analysis, many common practices of humankind preserve low-efficient procedures. Balancing tubes during centrifugation exemplifies such a problem in laboratory practice. Using combination of symmetry group theory…
This paper shows how to evolve numerically the maximum entropy probability distributions for a given set of constraints, which is a variational calculus problem. An evolutionary algorithm can obtain approximations to some well-known…
There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…