8 papers
Extremal subtrees of critical beta-splitting trees
Anna Brandenberger, Byron Chin, Elchanan Mossel
We determine the most and least likely shapes for an instance of the critical beta-splitting tree via a connection to data compression and Huffman's minimum redundancy codes. This…
Genetic Algorithms with Optimization Guided Operators
Anna Brandenberger, Ilan Doron-Arad, Elchanan Mossel
Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved ar…
A Quantum of Hope
Shawn E. S. Skelton, Anna Knörr, Jaime Redondo-Yuste +2
Public outreach in quantum science and technologies has many goals, ranging from generating interest and dampening hype to making the fascinating and complex topic more accessible.…
Asymptotics for the harmonic descent chain and applications to critical beta-splitting trees
Anna Brandenberger, Byron Chin, Elchanan Mossel
Motivated by the connection to a probabilistic model of phylogenetic trees introduced by Aldous, we study the recursive sequence governed by the rule $x_n = \sum_{i=1}^{n-1} \frac{…
Detecting Abrupt Changes in Point Processes: Fundamental Limits and Applications
Anna Brandenberger, Elchanan Mossel, Anirudh Sridhar
We consider the problem of detecting abrupt changes (i.e., large jump discontinuities) in the rate function of a point process. The rate function is assumed to be fully unknown, no…
Finding the root in random nearest neighbor trees
Anna Brandenberger, Cassandra Marcussen, Elchanan Mossel +1
We study the inference of network archaeology in growing random geometric graphs. We consider the root finding problem for a random nearest neighbor tree in dimension $d \in \mathb…
Matching Algorithms in the Sparse Stochastic Block Model
Anna Brandenberger, Byron Chin, Nathan S. Sheffield +1
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a generalization of the Erdős--Rényi model of random graphs that describes the interaction of a finite number of distinct communities. In sparse…
Errors are Robustly Tamed in Cumulative Knowledge Processes
Anna Brandenberger, Cassandra Marcussen, Elchanan Mossel +1
We study processes of societal knowledge accumulation, where the validity of a new unit of knowledge depends both on the correctness of its derivation and on the validity of the un…