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In a classical optimal stopping problem the aim is to maximize the expected value of a functional of a diffusion evaluated at a stopping time. This note considers optimal stopping problems beyond this paradigm. We study problems in which…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-08-04 Vicky Henderson , David Hobson , Matthew Zeng

In the "correlated sampling" problem, two players are given probability distributions $P$ and $Q$, respectively, over the same finite set, with access to shared randomness. Without any communication, the two players are each required to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Mohammad Bavarian , Badih Ghazi , Elad Haramaty , Pritish Kamath , Ronald L. Rivest , Madhu Sudan

Recently noticed ability of restart to reduce the expected completion time of first-passage processes allows appealing opportunities for performance improvement in a variety of settings. However, complex stochastic processes often exhibit…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-02-27 Sergey Belan

We study the single-choice Prophet Inequality problem when the gambler is given access to samples. We show that the optimal competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be achieved with a single sample from each distribution. When the distributions are…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aviad Rubinstein , Jack Z. Wang , S. Matthew Weinberg

Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-04-21 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Palash Dey

Order statistics theory is applied in this paper to probabilistic robust control theory to compute the minimum sample size needed to come up with a reliable estimate of an uncertain quantity under continuity assumption of the related…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-05-13 Xinjia Chen , Kemin Zhou

Let $\eta_i, i=1,..., n$ be iid Bernoulli random variables, taking values $\pm 1$ with probability 1/2. Given a multiset $V$ of $n$ elements $v_1, ..., v_n$ of an additive group $G$, we define the \emph{concentration probability} of $V$ as…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-12-06 Hoi H. Nguyen

We shall show in this paper that there are experiments which are Bernoulli trials with success probability p > 0.5, and which have the curious feature that it is possible to correctly predict the outcome with probability > p.

Other Statistics · Statistics 2018-01-09 James D. Stein

Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-09-11 Peter Glynn , Sandeep Juneja

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-22 Mark Cannon

As was noted already by A. N. Kolmogorov, any random variable has a Bernoulli component. This observation provides a tool for the extension of results which are known for Bernoulli random variables to arbitrary distributions. Two…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-10-26 Michael Aizenman , Francois Germinet , Abel Klein , Simone Warzel

We analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the probability of observing the expected number of successes at each stage of a sequence of nested Bernoulli trials. Our motivation is the attempt to give a genuinely frequentist interpretation to the…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-05-19 Eckhard Schlemm

We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Tomer Ezra

We take a unifying approach to single selection optimal stopping problems with random arrival order and independent sampling of items. In the problem we consider, a decision maker (DM) initially gets to sample each of $N$ items…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-08-11 José Correa , Andrés Cristi , Boris Epstein , José Soto

We study the best-choice problem for processes which generalise the process of records from Poisson-paced i.i.d. observations. Under the assumption that the observer knows distribution of the process and the horizon, we determine the…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Alexander Gnedin

We consider an optimal stopping problem with n correlated offers where the goal is to design a (randomized) stopping strategy that maximizes the expected value of the offer in the sequence at which we stop. Instead of assuming to know the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Pieter Kleer , Daan Noordenbos

A Bernoulli scheme with unequal harmonic success probabilities is investigated, together with some of its natural extensions. The study includes the number of successes over some time window, the times to (between) successive successes and…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-05-17 Thierry Huillet , Martin Möhle

The Josephus problem is a well--studied elimination problem consisting in determining the position of the survivor after repeated applications of a deterministic rule removing one person at a time from a given group. A natural probabilistic…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-09-25 Faustin Adiceam , Steven Robertson , Victor Shirandami , Ioannis Tsokanos

We approximate the distribution of the sum of independent but not necessarily identically distributed Bernoulli random variables using a shifted binomial distribution where the three parameters (the number of trials, the probability of…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-04-02 Vydas Čekanavičius , Erol A. Peköz , Adrian Röllin , Michael Shwartz

A/B testing refers to the task of determining the best option among two alternatives that yield random outcomes. We provide distribution-dependent lower bounds for the performance of A/B testing that improve over the results currently…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-02-25 Emilie Kaufmann , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier