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Luc Devroye

Publications and source records attributed to Luc Devroye.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2019

Hipster random walks

We introduce and study a family of random processes on trees we call hipster random walks, special instances of which we heuristically connect to the min-plus binary trees introduced by Robin Pemantle and studied by Auffinger and Cable (2017; arXiv:1709.07849), and to the critical random hierarchical lattice studied by Hambly and Jordan (2004). We prove distributional convergence for the processes by showing that their evolutions can be understood as a discrete analogues of certain convection-diffusion equations, then using a combination of coupling arguments and results from the numerical analysis literature on convergence of numerical approximations of PDEs.

math.PR↗
arXiv2019

An analysis of budgeted parallel search on conditional Galton-Watson trees

Recently Avis and Jordan have demonstrated the efficiency of a simple technique called budgeting for the parallelization of a number of tree search algorithms. The idea is to limit the amount of work that a processor performs before it terminates its search and returns any unexplored nodes to a master process. This limit is set by a critical budget parameter which determines the overhead of the process. In this paper we study the behaviour of the budget parameter on conditional Galton-Watson trees obtaining asymptotically tight bounds on this overhead. We present empirical results to show that this bound is surprisingly accurate in practice.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2019

Discrete minimax estimation with trees

We propose a simple recursive data-based partitioning scheme which produces piecewise-constant or piecewise-linear density estimates on intervals, and show how this scheme can determine the optimal $L_1$ minimax rate for some discrete nonparametric classes.

math.ST↗
arXiv2019

On the discovery of the seed in uniform attachment trees

We investigate the size of vertex confidence sets for including part of (or the entirety of) the seed in seeded uniform attachment trees, given knowledge of some of the seed's properties, and with a prescribed probability of failure. We also study the problem of identifying the leaves of a seed in a seeded uniform attachment tree, given knowledge of the positions of all internal nodes of the seed.

math.ST↗
arXiv2019

K-cut on paths and some trees

We define the (random) $k$-cut number of a rooted graph to model the difficulty of the destruction of a resilient network. The process is as the cut model of Meir and Moon except now a node must be cut $k$ times before it is destroyed. The first order terms of the expectation and variance of $\mathcal{X}_{n}$, the $k$-cut number of a path of length $n$, are proved. We also show that $\mathcal{X}_{n}$, after rescaling, converges in distribution to a limit $\mathcal{B}_{k}$, which has a complicated representation. The paper then briefly discusses the $k$-cut number of some trees and general graphs. We conclude by some analytic results which may be of interest.

math.PR↗
arXiv2018

Remote Sampling with Applications to General Entanglement Simulation

We show how to sample exactly discrete probability distributions whose defining parameters are distributed among remote parties. For this purpose, von Neumann's rejection algorithm is turned into a distributed sampling communication protocol. We study the expected number of bits communicated among the parties and also exhibit a trade-off between the number of rounds of the rejection algorithm and the number of bits transmitted in the initial phase. Finally, we apply remote sampling to the simulation of quantum entanglement in its most general form possible, when an arbitrary number of parties share systems of arbitrary dimensions on which they apply arbitrary measurements (not restricted to being projective measurements). In case the dimension of the systems and the number of possible outcomes per party is bounded by a constant, it suffices to communicate an expected O(m^2) bits in order to simulate exactly the outcomes that these measurements would have produced on those systems, where m is the number of participants.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2017

A lower bound on the size of an absorbing set in an arc-coloured tournament

Bousquet, Lochet and Thomassé recently gave an elegant proof that for any integer $n$, there is a least integer $f(n)$ such that any tournament whose arcs are coloured with $n$ colours contains a subset of vertices $S$ of size $f(n)$ with the property that any vertex not in $S$ admits a monochromatic path to some vertex of $S$. In this note we provide a lower bound on the value $f(n)$.

math.CO↗
arXiv2017

Notes on Growing a Tree in a Graph

We study the height of a spanning tree $T$ of a graph $G$ obtained by starting with a single vertex of $G$ and repeatedly selecting, uniformly at random, an edge of $G$ with exactly one endpoint in $T$ and adding this edge to $T$.

math.PR↗
arXiv2017

The heavy path approach to Galton-Watson trees with an application to Apollonian networks

We study the heavy path decomposition of conditional Galton-Watson trees. In a standard Galton-Watson tree conditional on its size $n$, we order all children by their subtree sizes, from large (heavy) to small. A node is marked if it is among the $k$ heaviest nodes among its siblings. Unmarked nodes and their subtrees are removed, leaving only a tree of marked nodes, which we call the $k$-heavy tree. We study various properties of these trees, including their size and the maximal distance from any original node to the $k$-heavy tree. In particular, under some moment condition, the $2$-heavy tree is with high probability larger than $cn$ for some constant $c > 0$, and the maximal distance from the $k$-heavy tree is $O(n^{1/(k+1)})$ in probability. As a consequence, for uniformly random Apollonian networks of size $n$, the expected size of the longest simple path is $Ω(n)$.

math.PR↗
arXiv2016

The graph structure of a deterministic automaton chosen at random: full version

A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) of $n$ states over a $k$-letter alphabet can be seen as a digraph with $n$ vertices which all have exactly $k$ labeled out-arcs ($k$-out digraph). In 1973 Grusho first proved that with high probability (whp) in a random $k$-out digraph there is a strongly connected component (SCC) of linear size that is reachable from all vertices, i.e., a giant. He also proved that the size of the giant follows a central limit law. We show that whp the part outside the giant contains at most a few short cycles and mostly consists of overlapping tree-like structures. Thus the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a random $k$-out digraph is almost the same as the digraph with the giant contracted into one vertex. These findings lead to a new, concise and self-contained proof of Grusho's theorem. This work also contains some other results including the structure outside the giant, the phase transition phenomenon in strong connectivity, the typical distance, and an extension to simple digraphs.

math.PR↗
arXiv2016

The expected bit complexity of the von Neumann rejection algorithm

In 1952, von Neumann introduced the rejection method for random variate generation. We revisit this algorithm when we have a source of perfect bits at our disposal. In this random bit model, there are universal lower bounds for generating a random variate with a given density to within an accuracy $ε$ derived by Knuth and Yao, and refined by the authors. In general, von Neumann's method fails in this model. We propose a modification that insures proper behavior for all Riemann-integrable densities on compact sets, and show that the expected number of random bits needed behaves optimally with respect to universal lower bounds. In particular, we introduce the notion of an oracle that evaluates the supremum and infimum of a function on any rectangle of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, and develop a quadtree-style extension of the classical rejection method.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2016

A study of large fringe and non-fringe subtrees in conditional Galton-Watson trees

We study the conditions for families of subtrees to exist with high probability (whp) in a Galton-Walton tree of size $n$. We first give a Poisson approximation of fringe subtree counts, which yields the height of the maximal complete $r$-ary fringe subtree. Then we determine the maximal $K_n$ such that every tree of size at most $K_n$ appears as fringe subtree whp. Finally, we study non-fringe subtree counts and determine the height of the maximal complete $r$-ary non-fringe subtree.

math.PR↗
arXiv2015

On the measure of Voronoi cells

$n$ independent random points drawn from a density $f$ in $R^d$ define a random Voronoi partition. We study the measure of a typical cell of the partition. We prove that the asymptotic distribution of the probability measure of the cell centered at a point $x \in R^d$ is independent of $x$ and the density $f$. We determine all moments of the asymptotic distribution and show that the distribution becomes more concentrated as $d$ becomes large. In particular, we show that the variance converges to zero exponentially fast in $d$. %We also study the measure of the largest cell of the partition. %{\red We also obtain a density-free bound for the rate of convergence of the diameter of a typical Voronoi cell.

math.ST↗
arXiv2015

Finding Adam in random growing trees

We investigate algorithms to find the first vertex in large trees generated by either the uniform attachment or preferential attachment model. We require the algorithm to output a set of $K$ vertices, such that, with probability at least $1-ε$, the first vertex is in this set. We show that for any $ε$, there exist such algorithms with $K$ independent of the size of the input tree. Moreover, we provide almost tight bounds for the best value of $K$ as a function of $ε$. In the uniform attachment case we show that the optimal $K$ is subpolynomial in $1/ε$, and that it has to be at least superpolylogarithmic. On the other hand, the preferential attachment case is exponentially harder, as we prove that the best $K$ is polynomial in $1/ε$. We conclude the paper with several open problems.

math.PR↗
arXiv2015

Sub-Gaussian mean estimators

We discuss the possibilities and limitations of estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable from independent and identically distributed observations from a non-asymptotic point of view. In particular, we define estimators with a sub-Gaussian behavior even for certain heavy-tailed distributions. We also prove various impossibility results for mean estimators.

math.ST↗
arXiv2015

Exceptional rotations of random graphs: a VC theory

In this paper we explore maximal deviations of large random structures from their typical behavior. We introduce a model for a high-dimensional random graph process and ask analogous questions to those of Vapnik and Chervonenkis for deviations of averages: how "rich" does the process have to be so that one sees atypical behavior. In particular, we study a natural process of Erdős-Rényi random graphs indexed by unit vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We investigate the deviations of the process with respect to three fundamental properties: clique number, chromatic number, and connectivity. In all cases we establish upper and lower bounds for the minimal dimension $d$ that guarantees the existence of "exceptional directions" in which the random graph behaves atypically with respect to the property. For each of the three properties, four theorems are established, to describe upper and lower bounds for the threshold dimension in the subcritical and supercritical regimes.

math.PR↗
arXiv2015

Exact simulation of the GHZ distribution

John Bell has shown that the correlations entailed by quantum mechanics cannot be reproduced by a classical process involving non-communicating parties. But can they be simulated with the help of bounded communication? This problem has been studied for more than two decades and it is now well understood in the case of bipartite entanglement. However, the issue was still widely open for multipartite entanglement, even for the simplest case, which is the tripartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. We give an exact simulation of arbitrary independent von Neumann measurements on general n-partite GHZ states. Our protocol requires O(n^2) bits of expected communication between the parties, and O(n log n) expected time is sufficient to carry it out in parallel. Furthermore, we need only an expectation of O(n) independent unbiased random bits, with no need for the generation of continuous real random variables nor prior shared random variables. In the case of equatorial measurements, we improve on the prior art with a protocol that needs only O(n log n) bits of communication and O(log^2 n) parallel time. At the cost of a slight increase in the number of bits communicated, these tasks can be accomplished with a constant expected number of rounds.

cs.IT↗