Related papers: The inspection paradox in stochastic resetting
A notably enhanced comprehension of the underlying meaning of quantum observations is achieved via a novel premise. Assessments, from first principles, are made of unexamined presumptions that lie at the heart of both conventional…
The effects of a stochastic reset, to its initial configuration, is studied in the exactly solvable one-dimensional coagulation-diffusion process. A finite resetting rate leads to a modified non-equilibrium stationary state. If in addition…
Human reading behavior is sensitive to surprisal: more predictable words tend to be read faster. Unexpectedly, this applies not only to the surprisal of the word that is currently being read, but also to the surprisal of upcoming…
We review the theory of renewal reward processes, which describes renewal processes that have some cost or reward associated with each cycle. We present a new simplified proof of the renewal reward theorem that mimics the proof of the…
Motivated by queueing applications, we study various reflected autoregressive processes with dependencies. Amongst others, we study cases where the interarrival and service times are proportionally dependent with additive and/or subtracting…
The problem of induction has persisted since Hume exposed the logical gap between repeated observation and universal inference. Traditional attempts to resolve it have oscillated between two extremes: the probabilistic optimism of Laplace…
The apparently trifling unexpected hanging paradox has generated an enormous philosophical literature. We introduce the mathematician to this literature, paying special attention to aspects that involve nontrivial mathematics. This xxx…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
Jeffreys-Lindley paradox is a case where frequentist and Bayesian hypothesis testing methodologies contradict with each other. This has caused confusion among data analysts for selecting a methodology for their statistical inference tasks.…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
We study airplane boarding in the limit of large number of passengers using geometric optics in a Lorentzian metric. The airplane boarding problem is naturally embedded in a 1+1 dimensional space-time with a flat Lorentzian metric. The…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
Optimal simultaneous control of position and momentum can be achieved by maximizing the probabilities of finding their experimentally observed values within two well-defined intervals. The assumption that particles move along straight lines…
The effect of burstiness in complex networks has received considerable attention. In particular, its effect on temporal distance and delays in the air transportation system is significant owing to their huge impact on our society.…
The so-called Lindley paradox is a counterintuitive statistical effect where the Bayesian and frequentist approaches to hypothesis testing give radically different answers, depending on the choice of the prior distribution. In this paper we…
The "twin paradox" of special relativity offers the possibility to make interstellar flights within a lifetime. For very long journeys with velocities close to the speed of light, however, we have to take into account the expansion of the…
The time of the first occurrence of a threshold crossing event in a stochastic process, known as the first passage time, is of interest in many areas of sciences and engineering. Conventionally, there is an implicit assumption that the…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
The Sleeping Beauty problem is a puzzle in probability theory that has gained much attention since Elga's discussion of it [Elga, Adam, Analysis 60 (2), p.143-147 (2000)]. Sleeping Beauty is put asleep, and a coin is tossed. If the outcome…
In making models for biological systems one expects to grasp the biology and be able to use ones intuition to predict the outcome. This paper is about the discrepancy between what is expected and what is the outcome of the analysis of the…