Related papers: The Lindy Effect
The original Kelly criterion provides a strategy to maximize the long-term growth of winnings in a sequence of simple Bernoulli bets with an edge, that is, when the expected return on each bet is positive. The objective of this work is to…
In many cohorts (such as the UK Biobank) on which Mendelian Randomization studies are routinely performed, data on participants' longevity is inadequate as the majority of participants are still living. To nevertheless estimate effects on…
We describe a simple model of how a publication's citations change over time, based on pure-birth stochastic processes with a linear cumulative advantage effect. The model is applied to citation data from the Physical Review corpus provided…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
We establish the existence of anomalous excess returns based on trend following strategies across four asset classes (commodities, currencies, stock indices, bonds) and over very long time scales. We use for our studies both futures time…
We develop a statistical test to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using state-of-the-art pre-training data detection techniques, we estimate the likelihood that a given prompt appeared…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
We derive confidence intervals and confidence sequences for causal effects in situations where the back-door or front-door criteria are applicable. Our tightest confidence intervals hold in the standard setting where the training data…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
More than half of the volume of our Universe is occupied by cosmic voids. The lensing magnification effect from those under-dense regions is generally thought to give a small dimming contribution: objects on the far side of a void are…
High-dimensional multivariate longitudinal data, which arise when many outcome variables are measured repeatedly over time, are becoming increasingly common in social, behavioral and health sciences. We propose a latent variable model for…
Familiar statistical tests and estimates are obtained by the direct observation of cases of interest: a clinical trial of a new drug, for instance, will compare the drug's effects on a relevant set of patients and controls. Sometimes,…
Inverse classification, the process of making meaningful perturbations to a test point such that it is more likely to have a desired classification, has previously been addressed using data from a single static point in time. Such an…
The h-index can be used as a predictor of itself. However, the evolution of the h-index with time is shown in the present investigation to be dominated for several years by citations to previous publications rather than by new scientific…
When decision makers evaluate a sequence of rewards, they may pay more attention to larger rewards and, given attention is limited, less attention to smaller rewards. They may also become less attentive to each reward when attention is…
Three statistical studies, all published between 2004 and 2008 but without referring to one another, assert a useful equivalence involving the hazard ratio, a parameter estimated for time to event data by the frequently used proportional…
Long ties, the social ties that bridge different communities, are widely believed to play crucial roles in spreading novel information in social networks. However, some existing network theories and prediction models indicate that long ties…
We consider the passage time problem for L\'evy processes, emphasising heavy tailed cases. Results are obtained under quite mild assumptions, namely, drift to $-\infty$ a.s. of the process, possibly at a linear rate (the finite mean case),…
The likelihood principle makes strong claims about the nature of statistical evidence but is controversial. Its claims are undermined by the existence of several examples that are assumed to show that it allows, with unity probability,…