Related papers: The Coupon Collector's Brother
Consider $n$ independent random numbers with a uniform distribution on $[0,1]$. The number of them that exceed their mean is shown to have an Eulerian distribution, i.e., it is described by the Eulerian numbers. This is related to, but…
A variant of the well-known Set Covering Problem is studied in this paper, where subsets of a collection have to be selected, and pairwise conflicts among subsets of items exist. The selection of each subset has a cost, and the inclusion of…
Consider a setting with multiple units (e.g., individuals, cohorts, geographic locations) and outcomes (e.g., treatments, times, items), where the goal is to learn a multivariate distribution for each unit-outcome entry, such as the…
We study a relaxation of the problem of coupling probability distributions -- a list of samples is generated from one distribution and an accept is declared if any one of these samples is identical to the sample generated from the other…
For a random sample of points in $\mathbb{R}$, we consider the number of pairs whose members are nearest neighbors (NN) to each other and the number of pairs sharing a common NN. The first type of pairs are called reflexive NNs whereas…
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…
The Collision problem is to decide whether a given list of numbers $(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in[n]^n$ is $1$-to-$1$ or $2$-to-$1$ when promised one of them is the case. We show an $n^{\Omega(1)}$ randomised communication lower bound for the natural…
An equation for the evolution of the distribution of wealth in a population of economic agents making binary transactions with a constant total amount of "money" has recently been proposed by one of us (RLR). This equation takes the form of…
Let $V$ be an $n$-set, and let $X$ be a random variable taking values in the powerset of $V$. Suppose we are given a sequence of random coupons $X_1, X_2, \ldots $, where the $X_i$ are independent random variables with distribution given by…
Given a discrete distribution, an interesting problem is to determine the minimum size of a random sample drawn from this distribution, in order to observe a given number of different records. This problem is related with many applied…
We study a basic auction design problem with online supply. There are two unit-demand bidders and two types of items. The first item type will arrive first for sure, and the second item type may or may not arrive. The auctioneer has to…
In this article we prove two cases of the abundance conjecture for $3$-folds in characteristic $p>5$: $(i)$ $(X, \Delta)$ is KLT and $\kappa(X, K_X+\Delta)=1$, and $(ii)$ $(X, 0)$ is KLT, $K_X\equiv 0$ and $X$ is not uniruled.
Consider n items located randomly on a circle of length 1. The locations of the items are assumed to be independent and uniformly distributed on [0,1). A picker starts at point 0 and has to collect all n items by moving along the circle at…
Given a set of coins arranged in a line, we remove heads-up coins one at a time and flip any adjacent coins after each removal. The coin-removal problem is to determine for which arrangements of coins it is possible to remove all of the…
We consider uniform random permutations in proper substitution-closed classes and study their limiting behavior in the sense of permutons. The limit depends on the generating series of the simple permutations in the class. Under a mild…
A principal and an agent divide a surplus. Only the agent knows the surplus' true size and decides how much of it to reveal initially. Both parties can exert costly effort to conclusively prove the surplus' true size. The agent's liability…
We address the question of the infinitude of twin and cousin prime pairs from a probabilistic perspective. Our approach partitions the set of integer numbers greater than $2$ in finite intervals of the form $[p_{n-1}^2,p_n^2)$, $p_{n-1}$…
An old question of Erdos asks if there exists, for each number N, a finite set S of integers greater than N and residue classes r(n) mod n for n in S whose union is all the integers. We prove that if $\sum_{n\in S} 1/n$ is bounded for such…
We consider the problem of estimating the number of types in a corpus using the number of types observed in a sample of tokens from that corpus. We derive exact and asymptotic distributions for the number of observed types, conditioned upon…
Let $A$ be a finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}^n$, which generates $\mathbb{Z}^n$ additively. We provide a precise description of the $N$-fold sumsets $NA$ for $N$ sufficiently large, with some explicit bounds on "sufficiently large."