Related papers: The Bottleneck Birthday Problem
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…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
We use the method of Maximum (relative) Entropy to process information in the form of observed data and moment constraints. The generic "canonical" form of the posterior distribution for the problem of simultaneous updating with data and…
A counting constraint satisfaction problem (#CSP) asks for the number of ways to satisfy a given list of constraints, drawn from a fixed constraint language \Gamma. We study how hard it is to evaluate this number approximately. There is an…
In this paper we propose a random CSP model, called Model GB, which is a natural generalization of standard Model B. It is proved that Model GB in which each constraint is easy to satisfy exhibits non-trivial behaviour (not trivially…
We consider the fundamental problem of selecting $k$ out of $n$ random variables in a way that the expected highest or second-highest value is maximized. This question captures several applications where we have uncertainty about the…
We study the minimum number of constraints needed to formulate random instances of the maximum stable set problem via linear programs (LPs), in two distinct models. In the uniform model, the constraints of the LP are not allowed to depend…
We use the exact finite sample likelihood and statistical decision theory to answer questions of ``why?'' and ``what should you have done?'' using data from randomized experiments and a utility function that prioritizes safety over…
The stable roommates problem does not necessarily have a solution, i.e. a stable matching. We had found that, for the uniformly random instance, the expected number of solutions converges to $e^{1/2}$ as $n$, the number of members, grows,…
It is generally hard to count, or even estimate, how many integer points lie in a polytope P. Barvinok and Hartigan have approached the problem by way of information theory, showing how to efficiently compute a random vector which samples…
Information Bottleneck (IB) is a technique to extract information about one target random variable through another relevant random variable. This technique has garnered significant interest due to its broad applications in information…
Knapsack problems are classic models that can formulate a wide range of applications. In this work, we deal with the Budgeted Maximum Coverage Problem (BMCP), which is a generalized 0-1 knapsack problem. Given a set of items with…
We give a trichotomy theorem for the complexity of approximately counting the number of satisfying assignments of a Boolean CSP instance. Such problems are parameterised by a constraint language specifying the relations that may be used in…
The set splittability problem is the following: given a finite collection of finite sets, does there exits a single set that contains exactly half the elements from each set in the collection? (If a set has odd size, we allow the floor or…
We give an elementary statistical analysis of two High Performance Computing issues, processor cache mapping and network port mapping. In both cases we find that, as in the birthday paradox, random assignment leads to more frequent…
We revisit a version of the classic occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown until almost all boxes receive a given number of balls. Special cases are widely known as coupon-collectors and dixie cup problems. We show that as the number of…
In the recent paper \cite{BDT10} we introduced a new problem that we call Bin Packing/Covering with Delivery, or BP/CD for short. Mainly we mean under this expression that we look for not only a good, but a "good and fast" packing or…
This paper deals with the stochastic modeling of a class of heterogeneous population in a random environment, called birth-death-swap. In addition to demographic events, swap events, i.e. moves between subgroups, occur in the population.…
We prove a Kolmogorov complexity variant of the birthday paradox. Sufficiently sized random subsets of strings are guaranteed to have two members x and y with low K(x/y). To prove this, we first show that the minimum conditional Kolmogorov…
Evaluating joint probabilities of potential outcomes and observed variables, and their linear combinations, is a fundamental challenge in causal inference. This paper addresses the bounding and identification of these probabilities in…