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On the derivation of some asymptotic expressions involving combinatorics

My questions come from the supplementary material in a recent preprint Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of money/energy exchange models. My first question comes from page 35. Specifically, suppose ...
Fei Cao's user avatar
  • 730
4 votes
2 answers
427 views

Binomial coefficient asymptotics

What is the probability that the number of heads in $n$ fair coin tosses is exactly $\lfloor n/2 + c\sqrt{n} \rfloor$ for $c \leq O(1)$, $n > \omega(1)$? Of course the answer is $$ \frac{1}{2^n} \...
Alek Westover's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
135 views

Cycle counts in Ewens measure as $\theta$ diverges

For $w$ a permutation, let $c(w)$ denote the total number of cycles and $c_i(w)$ denote the number of $i$-cycles. The Ewens measure is a one-parameter probability distribution on permutations where ...
Zach H's user avatar
  • 1,989
13 votes
2 answers
518 views

Asymptotics of a randomized Fibonacci sequence

Let $f(1)=f(2)=1$ and recursively define $f(n+1) = f(n) + f(i)$, where $i$ is chosen uniformly at random from $1,\ldots,n-1$. About how big should we expect $f(n)$ to be for $n$ large? We can examine ...
Christopher D. Long's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
153 views

Randomized version of Turán's theorem II

$\newcommand{\om}{\omega}$Let $\om(G)$ denote the number of vertices in a largest clique of an (undirected) graph $G$ with the set $[n]:=\{1,\dots,n\}$ of vertices. Then \begin{equation} \om(G)\ge\...
Iosif Pinelis's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
209 views

Randomized version of Turán's theorem

Turán's theorem says the following. Take any natural $n$ and $r$. Suppose that \begin{equation*} |G|>\Big(1-\frac1r\Big)\frac{n^2}2, \tag{0} \end{equation*} where $|G|$ is the number of edges of ...
Iosif Pinelis's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
208 views

Local behavior of the Vandermonde convolution

An interesting combinatorial identity is the Vandermonde convolution identity: $$ \sum_k {n\choose k}{m\choose s-k} = {n+m \choose s},$$ which can be proved by considering the coefficients in $(x+1)^{...
Student's user avatar
  • 5,230
2 votes
2 answers
185 views

Independence depth of linearly dependent random variables

Suppose, $\Xi$ is a collection of random variables. We call $\Xi$ $k$-independent, iff any $k$ distinct elements of $\Xi$ are mutually independent. For example, $2$-independence is pairwise ...
Chain Markov's user avatar
  • 2,618
3 votes
1 answer
109 views

Asymptotic estimate of the cardinality of $H_{2n}=\{\vec{a} \in [-N,N]^{2n}:\sum_{i=1}^{2n} a_i = 0\}$

Let's suppose $a_i \sim \mathcal{U}([-N,N])$ where $[-N,N] \subset \mathbb{Z}$. We may then define: \begin{equation} S_n = \sum_{i=1}^n a_i \tag{1} \end{equation} Now, in order to estimate $\lvert ...
Aidan Rocke's user avatar
  • 3,871
7 votes
3 answers
790 views

Expected cardinality of a randomly chosen element of the family of subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ with at most $k$-elements

Assume that $1\le k \le n$ and let $\mathscr{Z}$ be the family of all subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ with at most $k$ elements. Pick a random element $X$ of $\mathscr{Z}$ (we consider the probablity ...
Dominik Kwietniak's user avatar
4 votes
0 answers
150 views

Dividing a finite arithmetic progression into two sets of same sum: always the same asymptotics?

This is inspired by the recent question How many solutions $\pm1\pm2\pm3…\pm n=0$. The oeis entries A063865 linked to this question and A292476/A156700 for the related one "How many solutions $\pm1\...
Wolfgang's user avatar
  • 13.4k
12 votes
1 answer
883 views

The dance marathon problem

In his book, "The Strange Logic of Random Graphs", Joel Spencer describes the "Dance Marathon" problem: Imagine $n$ couples at a Dance Marathon. Each dance each couple remains ...
Bill Bradley's user avatar
  • 3,979
6 votes
1 answer
3k views

Mathematical expectation of minimum of k random variables with fixed sum n

We have $n$ independent identically distributed random variables $X_1$, $X_2$, ..., $X_N$, $X_i=j$ with probability $1/k$ for $j=1, 2, ... k$. Let $Y_j$ be a number of random variables $X_i$, which ...
Ilya's user avatar
  • 251
3 votes
1 answer
198 views

Generalized Shared Birthday

Suppose a year has $d$ days. How many people should be in a room so that there are at least $2k$ people in the room with birthdays shared with each other (all could be same day or there could be $k$ ...
user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
207 views

Upper bound on the number of binary matrices with small rank

I'm looking for the tightest upper bound on the number of different binary matrices $A \in {\{-1,1\}^{m \times n}}$ for which $\mathrm{rank}(A)\leq r$. I'm interested in the regime $1 \ll r \ll m \...
Daniel Soudry's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
222 views

Asymptotics of subgraph densities in graphons

In Pittel (1989)'s solution to a problem of Knuth (1976) on the expected number of stable matchings between $n$ men and $n$ women under uniform random preferences, it was shown that, as $n \to \infty$,...
Yufei Zhao's user avatar
3 votes
0 answers
157 views

Growth of inner products between two random vectors on the sparse hypercube

We define the $s$-sparse hypercube in $\mathbb{R}^d$ as \begin{align} \mathbb{H}_s = \bigl \{ {\bf{v}} \in \{ -1, 0 , 1\}^d \colon \| {\bf{v}} \|_0 = s \bigr\}, \end{align} where $ \| {\bf v} \|_0 $ ...
Steve's user avatar
  • 1,127
3 votes
0 answers
268 views

A generalization of coupon collector problem - $\geq1$ pick per experiment

Mix $T\geq1$ coupons numbered $1$ to $T$ with a set of $S\geq0$ number of dummy coupons with no numbers. Select $N\geq1$ coupons at each trial at random and put them back. $N=1$ is standard coupon ...
user avatar
5 votes
0 answers
240 views

Paths in Pascal's triangle; or balanced $0-1$ initial segments

Here is a problem arising (via a tortuous path) from trying to determine the spectrum of Vershik's adic map on Pascal's triangle (a moderately well-known question: is the spectrum trivial, that is, is ...
David Handelman's user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
896 views

A balls and urns model for a hashing problem

Fix $N \in \mathbb{N}$. Suppose we throw $N$ numbered balls into $N$ numbered urns, so that for each $b \in \{1,\ldots,N\}$, ball $b$ lands in urn $j$ with equal probability $1/N$. Choose a number $c \...
Mark Wildon's user avatar
  • 11.2k
1 vote
0 answers
273 views

A natural sum over multisets (expectation over multinomial)

I think this is a natural question but am not sure where to find resources. Consider the possible multisets arising from choosing $n$ times an item from one of $k$ categories. We can represent one ...
usul's user avatar
  • 4,529
7 votes
5 answers
682 views

Bound on sum of complex summands involving binomial coefficients

I am trying to find the asymptotic behavior of the sum: $$ \sum^n_{i=0} \begin{pmatrix} 2n \\ i \end{pmatrix} x^i y^{2n-i}$$ as $n\rightarrow\infty$. Here $x$, $y$ are complex numbers and I have $|x|...
teagut's user avatar
  • 93
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

A generalized urn-ball matching problem; Complicated combinatoric/probabilistic limit

I'm looking for a generalization to the urn-ball matching problem. As a reminder of what I've got in mind, here's the simple version: Randomly assign (with replacement) $N$ balls to $M$ urns. ...
Mike C's user avatar
  • 127
5 votes
0 answers
215 views

Asymptotics of a Splitting Process

Consider $p(n)$ defined recursively by $p(1)=1$ and $\displaystyle p(n)=\frac{1}{(n-1)^n}\sum_{i=1}^{n-1}\left\{\sum_{j=i}^{n-1}(-1)^{j-i}{n \choose j}{j\choose i}(n-j)^j(n-j-1)^{n-j}\right\}p(i)$. ...
Wiley's user avatar
  • 667
2 votes
2 answers
291 views

How many boxes so that there is $k$ of same of color from $n$ different colors?

Say you have $m$ boxes each of which is colored with one of $n$ colors. What should $m$ be so that the probability that there is atleast $k$ boxes with one same color is strictly greater than $\frac{1}...
Turbo's user avatar
  • 13.9k
1 vote
0 answers
243 views

Factorization of permutations.

Let $n,k$ be positive integers such that $3n=2k$ and $N = \lfloor \alpha n\rfloor$ for some constant $0<\alpha<1$. Let $S_{3n}$ denote the permutation group of order $3n$. Consider the following ...
gmath's user avatar
  • 141
5 votes
0 answers
227 views

Number of times lead changes in a multi-candidate election (reference-request)

In a two candidate election where votes are distributed uniformly at random between the candidates, the probability that the lead changes when tallying the $i$-th vote is the same as the probability ...
Kev's user avatar
  • 51