Related papers: The Polya Urn: Limit Theorems, Polya Divergence, M…
We study vectors chosen at random from a compact convex polytope in $\mathbb{R}^n$ given by a finite number of linear constraints. We determine which projections of these random vectors are asymptotically normal as $n\to\infty$. Marginal…
Consider an urn containing balls labeled with integer values. Define a discrete-time random process by drawing two balls, one at a time and with replacement, and noting the labels. Add a new ball labeled with the sum of the two drawn…
The classical problem of maximizing the Shannon entropy of a sum of independent random variables supported on a finite alphabet is considered and settled in the ternary case. Namely, the following theorem is established: if…
Let $r=r(n)$ be a sequence of integers such that $r\leq n$ and let $X_1,\ldots,X_{r+1}$ be independent random points distributed according to the Gaussian, the Beta or the spherical distribution on $\mathbb{R}^n$. Limit theorems for the…
We prove a central limit theorem (CLT) for the number of joint orbits of random tuples of commuting permutations. In the uniform sampling case this generalizes the classic CLT of Goncharov for the number of cycles of a single random…
Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…
An amended MaxEnt formulation for systems displaced from the conventional MaxEnt equilibrium is proposed. This formulation involves the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to a reference $Q$ (or maximization of Shannon…
The purpose of this work is to establish a central limit theorem that can be applied to a particular form of Markov chains, including the number of descents in a random permutation of $\mathfrak{S}_n$, two-type generalized P{\'o}lya urns,…
Probabilistic reasoning systems combine different probabilistic rules and probabilistic facts to arrive at the desired probability values of consequences. In this paper we describe the MESA-algorithm (Maximum Entropy by Simulated Annealing)…
MaxEnt's variational principle, in conjunction with Shannon's logarithmic information measure, yields only exponential functional forms in straightforward fashion. In this communication we show how to overcome this limitation via the…
We study the inverse problem of inferring the state of a finite-level quantum system from expected values of a fixed set of observables, by maximizing a continuous ranking function. We have proved earlier that the maximum-entropy inference…
Given a finite connected graph G, place a bin at each vertex. Two bins are called a pair if they share an edge of G. At discrete times, a ball is added to each pair of bins. In a pair of bins, one of the bins gets the ball with probability…
This paper considers a two-color, single-draw urn model with two types of balls, denoted type $1$ and type $2$, with initial counts $Y^1_0\in N^+$ and $Y^2_0\in N^+$, respectively. At each discrete time step, a ball is drawn uniformly at…
A new nonparametric model of maximum-entropy (MaxEnt) copula density function is proposed, which offers the following advantages: (i) it is valid for mixed random vector. By `mixed' we mean the method works for any combination of discrete…
An urn model of Diaconis and some generalizations are discussed. A convergence theorem is proved that implies for Diaconis' model that the empirical distribution of balls in the urn converges with probability one to the uniform…
In two recent works, Kuba and Mahmoud (arXiv:1503.090691 and arXiv:1509.09053) introduced the family of two-color affine balanced Polya urn schemes with multiple drawings. We show that, in large-index urns (urn index between $1/2$ and $1$)…
A broad set of sufficient conditions that guarantees the existence of the maximum entropy (maxent) distribution consistent with specified bounds on certain generalized moments is derived. Most results in the literature are either focused on…
We take a unified approach to central limit theorems for a class of irreducible urn models with constant replacement matrix. Depending on the eigenvalue, we consider appropriate linear combinations of the number of balls of different…
We collect, survey and develop methods of (one-dimensional) stochastic approximation in a framework that seems suitable to handle fairly broad generalizations of Polya urns. To show the applicability of the results we determine the limiting…
Maximum likelihood estimation is a valuable tool often applied to inverse problems in quantum theory. Estimation from small data sets can, however, have non unique solutions. We discuss this problem and propose to use Jaynes maximum entropy…