30,496 research outputs found
Limits and Degenerations of Unitary Conformal Field Theories
In the present paper, degeneration phenomena in conformal field theories are
studied. For this purpose, a notion of convergent sequences of CFTs is
introduced. Properties of the resulting limit structure are used to associate
geometric degenerations to degenerating sequences of CFTs, which, as familiar
from large volume limits of non-linear sigma models, can be regarded as
commutative degenerations of the corresponding ``quantum geometries''.
As an application, the large level limit of the A-series of unitary Virasoro
minimal models is investigated in detail. In particular, its geometric
interpretation is determined.Comment: 57 pages, no figures; minor clarifications and reference added; final
version to appear in Commun. Math. Phy
Use of the geometric mean as a statistic for the scale of the coupled Gaussian distributions
The geometric mean is shown to be an appropriate statistic for the scale of a
heavy-tailed coupled Gaussian distribution or equivalently the Student's t
distribution. The coupled Gaussian is a member of a family of distributions
parameterized by the nonlinear statistical coupling which is the reciprocal of
the degree of freedom and is proportional to fluctuations in the inverse scale
of the Gaussian. Existing estimators of the scale of the coupled Gaussian have
relied on estimates of the full distribution, and they suffer from problems
related to outliers in heavy-tailed distributions. In this paper, the scale of
a coupled Gaussian is proven to be equal to the product of the generalized mean
and the square root of the coupling. From our numerical computations of the
scales of coupled Gaussians using the generalized mean of random samples, it is
indicated that only samples from a Cauchy distribution (with coupling parameter
one) form an unbiased estimate with diminishing variance for large samples.
Nevertheless, we also prove that the scale is a function of the geometric mean,
the coupling term and a harmonic number. Numerical experiments show that this
estimator is unbiased with diminishing variance for large samples for a broad
range of coupling values.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure
Geometric Random Inner Products: A New Family of Tests for Random Number Generators
We present a new computational scheme, GRIP (Geometric Random Inner
Products), for testing the quality of random number generators. The GRIP
formalism utilizes geometric probability techniques to calculate the average
scalar products of random vectors generated in geometric objects, such as
circles and spheres. We show that these average scalar products define a family
of geometric constants which can be used to evaluate the quality of random
number generators. We explicitly apply the GRIP tests to several random number
generators frequently used in Monte Carlo simulations, and demonstrate a new
statistical property for good random number generators
Multifractal Properties of Aperiodic Ising Model: role of geometric fluctuations
The role of the geometric fluctuations on the multifractal properties of the
local magnetization of aperiodic ferromagnetic Ising models on hierachical
lattices is investigated. The geometric fluctuations are introduced by
generalized Fibonacci sequences. The local magnetization is evaluated via an
exact recurrent procedure encompassing a real space renormalization group
decimation. The symmetries of the local magnetization patterns induced by the
aperiodic couplings is found to be strongly (weakly) different, with respect to
the ones of the corresponding homogeneous systems, when the geometric
fluctuations are relevant (irrelevant) to change the critical properties of the
system. At the criticality, the measure defined by the local magnetization is
found to exhibit a non-trivial F(alpha) spectra being shifted to higher values
of alpha when relevant geometric fluctuations are considered. The critical
exponents are found to be related with some special points of the F(alpha)
function and agree with previous results obtained by the quite distinct
transfer matrix approach.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 Tables, 17 reference
Statistical Modeling of Spatial Extremes
The areal modeling of the extremes of a natural process such as rainfall or
temperature is important in environmental statistics; for example,
understanding extreme areal rainfall is crucial in flood protection. This
article reviews recent progress in the statistical modeling of spatial
extremes, starting with sketches of the necessary elements of extreme value
statistics and geostatistics. The main types of statistical models thus far
proposed, based on latent variables, on copulas and on spatial max-stable
processes, are described and then are compared by application to a data set on
rainfall in Switzerland. Whereas latent variable modeling allows a better fit
to marginal distributions, it fits the joint distributions of extremes poorly,
so appropriately-chosen copula or max-stable models seem essential for
successful spatial modeling of extremes.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-STS376 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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