Related papers: Leading All The Way

The Lonely Runner Conjecture was posed independently by Wills and Cusick and has many applications in different mathematical fields, such as diophantine approximation. This well-known conjecture states that for any set of runners running…

The Bayesian framework is ideally suited for induction problems. The probability of observing $x_t$ at time $t$, given past observations $x_1...x_{t-1}$ can be computed with Bayes' rule if the true distribution $\mu$ of the sequences…

We study an example of a {\em hit-and-run} random walk on the symmetric group $\mathbf S_n$. Our starting point is the well understood {\em top-to-random} shuffle. In the hit-and-run version, at each {\em single step}, after picking the…

We consider the best-choice problem for independent (not necessarily iid) observations $X_1, \cdots, X_n$ with the aim of selecting the sample minimum. We show that in this full generality the monotone case of optimal stopping holds and the…

We study the biased random walk in positive random conductances on $\mathbb {Z}^d$. This walk is transient in the direction of the bias. Our main result is that the random walk is ballistic if, and only if, the conductances have finite…

We consider the urn setting with two different objects, ``good'' and ``bad'', and analyze the number of draws without replacement until a good object is picked. Although the expected number of draws for this setting is a standard textbook…

Let $(Y_n)$ be a sequence of i.i.d. $\mathbb Z$-valued random variables with law $\mu$. The reflected random walk $(X_n)$ is defined recursively by $X_0=x \in \mathbb N_0, X_{n+1}=|X_n+Y_{n+1}|$. Under mild hypotheses on the law $\mu$, it…

First-passage properties of continuous stochastic processes confined in a 1--dimensional interval are well described. However, for jump processes (discrete random walks), the characterization of the corresponding observables remains…

We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…

A random walk in a sparse random environment is a model introduced by Matzavinos et al. [Electron. J. Probab. 21, paper no. 72: 2016] as a generalization of both a simple symmetric random walk and a classical random walk in a random…

We consider a random walk among i.i.d. obstacles on the one dimensional integer lattice under the condition that the walk starts from the origin and reaches a remote location y. The obstacles are represented by a killing potential, which…

Given a skew-symmetric matrix, the corresponding two-player symmetric zero-sum game is defined as follows: one player, the row player, chooses a row and the other player, the column player, chooses a column. The payoff of the row player is…

Motivated by a problem posed by Aldous, our goal is to find the maximal-entropy win-martingale: In a sports game between two teams, the chance the home team wins is initially $x_0 \in (0,1)$ and finally 0 or 1. As an idealization we take a…

Consider the following broadcasting process run on a connected graph $G=(V,E)$. Suppose that $k \ge 2$ agents start on vertices selected from $V$ uniformly and independently at random. One of the agents has a message that she wants to…

Consider two random walks on $\mathbb{Z}$. The transition probabilities of each walk is dependent on trajectory of the other walker i.e. a drift $p>1/2$ is obtained in a position the other walker visited twice or more. This simple model has…

The time dependence of the survival probability, S(t), is determined for diffusing particles in two dimensions which are also driven by a random unidirectional zero-mean velocity field, v_x(y). For a semi-infinite system with unbounded y…

Let X_t, 0<=t<=T be a one-dimensional stochastic process with independent and stationary increments. This paper considers the problem of stopping the process X_t "as close as possible" to its eventual supremum M_T:=sup{X_t: 0<=t<=T}, when…

Let $N$ and $M$ be positive integers satisfying $1\le M\le N$, and let $0<p_0<p_1<1$. Define a process $\{X_n\}_{n=0}^\infty$ on $\mathbb{Z}$ as follows. At each step, the process jumps either one step to the right or one step to the left,…

An object is hidden in one of $N$ boxes. Initially, the probability that it is in box $i$ is $\pi_i(0)$. You then search in continuous time, observing box $J_t$ at time $t$, and receiving a signal as you observe: if the box you are…

We study one-dimensional excited random walks with non-nearest neighbor jumps. When the process is at a vertex that has not been visited before, its next transition has a positive drift to the right, possibly with long jumps. Whenever the…