相关论文: Singletons for Simpletons: Revisiting Windowed Bac…

We develop a new technique for proving distribution testing lower bounds for properties defined by inequalities involving the bin probabilities of the distribution in question. Using this technique we obtain new lower bounds for…

Load balancing is a well-studied problem, with balls-in-bins being the primary framework. The greedy algorithm $\mathsf{Greedy}[d]$ of Azar et al. places each ball by probing $d > 1$ random bins and placing the ball in the least loaded of…

There are many ways of establishing upper bounds on fluctuations of random variables, but there is no systematic approach for lower bounds. As a result, lower bounds are unknown in many important problems. This paper introduces a general…

This paper derives confidence intervals (CI) and time-uniform confidence sequences (CS) for the classical problem of estimating an unknown mean from bounded observations. We present a general approach for deriving concentration bounds, that…

A new pattern search method for bound constrained optimization is introduced. The proposed algorithm employs the coordinate directions, in a suitable way, with a nonmonotone line search for accepting the new iterate, without using…

The Bin Packing Problem involves efficiently packing items into a limited number of bins without exceeding their capacity. In this paper, we try to answer a specific question in this field. Mathematically the combinatorial optimization…

We estimate the mixing time of the a nonreversible finite Markov chain called Repeated Balls-into-Bins (RBB) process. This process is a discrete time conservative interacting particle system with parallel updates. Place initially in $L$…

We study the relative entropy of the empirical probability vector with respect to the true probability vector in multinomial sampling of $k$ categories, which, when multiplied by sample size $n$, is also the log-likelihood ratio statistic.…

Many inference problems, such as sequential decision problems like A/B testing, adaptive sampling schemes like bandit selection, are often online in nature. The fundamental problem for online inference is to provide a sequence of confidence…

We prove a Bernstein-type bound for the difference between the average of negative log-likelihoods of independent discrete random variables and the Shannon entropy, both defined on a countably infinite alphabet. The result holds for the…

Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…

We introduce a new PAC-Bayes oracle bound for unbounded losses that extends Cram\'er-Chernoff bounds to the PAC-Bayesian setting. The proof technique relies on controlling the tails of certain random variables involving the Cram\'er…

We propose a simple, projection-based algorithm for clustering mixtures of discrete (Bernoulli) distributions. Unlike previous approaches that rely on coordinate-specific ``combinatorial projections,'' our algorithm is rotationally…

We propose an exact technique to calculate lower bounds of spectral gaps of discrete time reversible Markov chains on finite state sets. Spectral gaps are a common tool for evaluating convergence rates of Markov chains. As an illustration,…

Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly "inelastic" collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the…

Given $n$ colored balls, we want to detect if more than $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ of them have the same color, and if so find one ball with such majority color. We are only allowed to choose two balls and compare their colors, and the goal is to…

In dynamic load balancing, we wish to distribute balls into bins in an environment where both balls and bins can be added and removed. We want to minimize the maximum load of any bin but we also want to minimize the number of balls and bins…

The histogram is a key method for visualizing data and estimating the underlying probability distribution. Incorrect conclusions about the data result from over or under-binning. A new method based on the Shannon entropy of the histogram…

The method is proposed for the study of many-point boundary value problems for systems of nonlinear ODE, by reducing them to special equivalent integral equations, and allows us [in contrast with the known method [1]] to consider boundary…

We study the classic Bin Packing problem in a fully-dynamic setting, where new items can arrive and old items may depart. We want algorithms with low asymptotic competitive ratio \emph{while repacking items sparingly} between updates.…