Related papers: The Strong Birthday Problem Revisited
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…
As an attempt to bridge the gap between the probabilistic world of classical information theory and the combinatorial world of zero-error information theory, this paper studies the performance of randomly generated codebooks over discrete…
Birthday problem is a well-known classic problem in probability theory widely applied in cryptography, and bubble sort is a popular sorting algorithm leading to some interesting theoretical problems in computer science. However, the…
A $(k \times l)$-birthday repetition $\mathcal{G}^{k \times l}$ of a two-prover game $\mathcal{G}$ is a game in which the two provers are sent random sets of questions from $\mathcal{G}$ of sizes $k$ and $l$ respectively. These two sets are…
We study the random variable B(c,n), which counts the number of balls that must be thrown into n equally-sized bins in order to obtain c collisions. The asymptotic expected value of B(1,n) is the well-known $\sqrt{n\pi/2}$ appearing in the…
A birthday surprise is the event that, given k uniformly random samples from a sample space of size n, at least two of them are identical. We show that Bernoulli numbers can be used to derive arbitrarily exact bounds on the probability of a…
The subset sum problem, also referred as SSP, is a NP-Hard computational problem. SSP has its applications in broad domains like cryptography, number theory, operation research and complexity theory. The most famous algorithm for solving…
The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…
This paper discusses the odds problem, proposed by Bruss in 2000, and its variants. A recurrence relation called a dynamic programming (DP) equation is used to find an optimal stopping policy of the odds problem and its variants. In 2013,…
The Schr\"odinger bridge problem (SBP) finds the most likely stochastic evolution between two probability distributions given a prior stochastic evolution. As well as applications in the natural sciences, problems of this kind have…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist notions, such as $p$-values, significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution. This feature results in violations of a principle known as the strong…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
Strong Branching (SB) is a cornerstone of all modern branching rules used in the Branch-and-Bound (BnB) algorithm, which is at the center of Mixed-Integer Programming solvers. In its full form, SB evaluates all variables to branch on and…
Three essential criteria are important for activity planning, including: (1) finding a group of attendees familiar with the initiator, (2) ensuring each attendee in the group to have tight social relations with most of the members in the…
Asymptotic factorizations for the small-ball probability (SmBP) of a Hilbert valued random element $X$ are rigorously established and discussed. In particular, given the first $d$ principal components (PCs) and as the radius $\varepsilon$…
Being able to compute efficiently a low-weight multiple of a given binary polynomial is often a key ingredient of correlation attacks to LFSR-based stream ciphers. The best known general purpose algorithm is based on the generalized…
Learning the community structure of a large-scale graph is a fundamental problem in machine learning, computer science and statistics. We study the problem of exactly recovering the communities in a graph generated from the Stochastic Block…
In this paper, we consider a probabilistic set covering problem (PSCP) in which each 0-1 row of the constraint matrix is random with a finite discrete distribution, and the objective is to minimize the total cost of the selected columns…
We introduce a new and broader formulation of the stable marriage problem (SMP), called the stable polygamy problem (SPP), where multiple individuals from a larger group $L$ of $|L|$ individuals can be matched with a single individual from…