Related papers: Youden's Demon is Sylvester's Problem
J. J. Sylvester's four-point problem asks for the probability that four points chosen uniformly at random in the plane have a triangle as their convex hull. Using a combinatorial classification of points in the plane due to Goodman and…
The curse of dimensionality is a common phenomenon which affects analysis of datasets characterized by large numbers of variables associated with each point. Problematic scenarios of this type frequently arise in classification algorithms…
Motivated by a problem on the 67th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, we will summarize three different solutions found on a website. This Putman problem is a special case of Sylvester's four point problem! Suppose four points…
Consider $d+2$ i.i.d. random points $X_1,\ldots, X_{d+2}$ in $\mathbb R^d$. In this note, we compute the probability that their convex hull is a simplex focusing on three specific distributional settings: (i) the distribution of $X_1$ is…
Consider a random walk in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that starts at the origin and whose increment distribution assigns zero probability to any affine hyperplane. We solve Sylvester's problem for these random walks by showing that the probability that…
We prove the four-dimensional Gaussian random vector maximum conjecture. This conjecture asserts that among all centered Gaussian random vectors $X=(X_1,X_2,X_3,X_4)$ with $E[X_i^2]=1$, $1\le i\le 4$, the expectation…
We solve the Random Euclidean Matching problem with exponent 2 for the Gaussian distribution defined on the plane. Previous works by Ledoux and Talagrand determined the leading behavior of the average cost up to a multiplicative constant.…
Suppose X is a random vector, that is distributed uniformly in some n-dimensional convex set. It was conjectured that when the dimension n is very large, there exists a non-zero vector u, such that the distribution of the real random…
Given independent normally distributed points A,B,C,D in Euclidean 3-space, let Q denote the plane determined by A,B,C and D^ denote the orthogonal projection of D onto Q. The probability that the tetrahedron ABCD is acute remains…
Let $X_1,\ldots, X_{d+2}$ be random points in $\mathbb R^d$. The classical Sylvester problem asks to determine the probability that the convex hull of these points, denoted by $P:= [X_1,\ldots, X_{d+2}]$, is a simplex. In the present paper,…
We discuss the application of random projections to the fundamental problem of deciding whether a given point in a Euclidean space belongs to a given set. We show that, under a number of different assumptions, the feasibility and…
We study the problem of estimating the mean of a random vector $X$ given a sample of $N$ independent, identically distributed points. We introduce a new estimator that achieves a purely sub-Gaussian performance under the only condition that…
We use Stein's method to obtain bounds on the rate of convergence for a class of statistics in geometric probability obtained as a sum of contributions from Poisson points which are exponentially stabilizing, i.e. locally determined in a…
In this paper we give a formula for the probability that $n$ random points chosen under the uniform distribution in a disk are in convex position. While close, the formula is recursive and is totally explicit only for the first values of…
Consider an unlimited homogeneous medium disturbed by points generated via Poisson process. The neighborhood of a point plays an important role in spatial statistics problems. Here, we obtain analytically the distance statistics to $k$th…
We prove that for $c>0$ a sufficiently small universal constant that a random set of $c d^2/\log^4(d)$ independent Gaussian random points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ lie on a common ellipsoid with high probability. This nearly establishes a…
Inspired by a chessboard puzzle of Dudeney, the general position problem in graph theory asks for a largest set $S$ of vertices in a graph such that no three elements of $S$ lie on a common shortest path. The number of vertices in such a…
Consider the problem of estimating the mean of a Gaussian random vector when the mean vector is assumed to be in a given convex set. The most natural solution is to take the Euclidean projection of the data vector on to this convex set; in…
We consider the problem of finding the probability that a random triangle is obtuse, which was first raised by Lewis Caroll. Our investigation leads us to a natural correspondence between plane polygons and the Grassmann manifold of…
A simple way of obtaining robust estimates of the "center" (or the "location") and of the "scatter" of a dataset is to use the maximum likelihood estimate with a class of heavy-tailed distributions, regardless of the "true" distribution…