Related papers: Urns & Tubes
In the classical Polya urn problem, one begins with $d$ bins, each containing one ball. Additional balls arrive one at a time, and the probability that an arriving ball is placed in a given bin is proportional to $m^\gamma$, where $m$ is…
A P\'olya urn process is a Markov chain that models the evolution of an urn containing some coloured balls, the set of possible colours being $\{1,\ldots,d\}$ for $d\in \mathbb{N}$. At each time step, a random ball is chosen uniformly in…
An infinite urn scheme is defined by a probability mass function $(p_j)_{j\geq1}$ over positive integers. A random allocation consists of a sample of $N$ independent drawings according to this probability distribution where $N$ may be…
The P\'olya urn scheme is a discrete-time process concerning the addition and removal of colored balls. There is a known embedding of it in continuous-time, called the P\'olya process. We deal with a generalization of this stochastic model,…
We describe a microcanonical approach for polymer models that combines atmospheric methods with urn theory. We show that Large Deviation Properties of urn models can provide quite deep mathematical insight by analyzing the Random Walk Range…
Consider the following two-player game on the edges of $K_n$, the complete graph with $n$ vertices: Starting with an empty graph $G$ on the vertex set of $K_n$, in each round the first player chooses $b \in \mathbb{N}$ edges from $K_n$…
We study two models of the Majority problem. We are given n balls and an unknown coloring of them with two colors. We can ask sets of balls of size k as queries, and in the so-called General Model the answer to a query shows if all the…
This paper considers the $(n,k)$-Bernoulli--Laplace model in the case when there are two urns, the total number of red and white balls is the same, and the number of selections $k$ at each step is on the same asymptotic order as the number…
For the interacting urn model with polynomial reinforcement, it has been conjectured that almost surely one color monopolizes all the urns if the interaction parameter $p>0$. We disprove the conjecture. For the case $p=1$, we give a…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral…
This paper develops an analytic theory for the study of some Polya urns with random rules. The idea is to extend the isomorphism theorem in Flajolet et al. (2006), which connects deterministic balanced urns to a differential system for the…
We introduce an urn model which describes spatial separation of sand. In this dynamical model, in a certain range of parameters spontaneous symmetry breaking takes place and equipartitioning of sand into two compartments is broken. The…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
Balls-in-bins models describe a random sequential allocation of infinitely many balls into a finite number of bins. In these models a ball is placed into a bin with probability proportional to a given function (feedback function), which…
Assume that $2n$ balls are thrown independently and uniformly at random into $n$ bins. We consider the unlikely event $E$ that every bin receives at least one ball, showing that $\Pr[E] = \Theta(b^n)$ where $b \approx 0.836$. Note that, due…
For the plain Polya urn with two colors, black and white, we prove a functional central limit theorem for the number of white balls assuming that the initial number of black balls is large. Depending on the initial number of white balls,…
Negative probabilities arise primarily in physics, statistical quantum mechanics and quantum computing. Negative probabilities arise as mixing distributions of unobserved latent variables in Bayesian modeling. Our goal is to provide a link…
Triangular distributions are a well-known class of distributions that are often used as an elementary example of a probability model. Maximum likelihood estimation of the mode parameter of the triangular distribution over the unit interval…