78,603 research outputs found
What's Decidable About Sequences?
We present a first-order theory of sequences with integer elements,
Presburger arithmetic, and regular constraints, which can model significant
properties of data structures such as arrays and lists. We give a decision
procedure for the quantifier-free fragment, based on an encoding into the
first-order theory of concatenation; the procedure has PSPACE complexity. The
quantifier-free fragment of the theory of sequences can express properties such
as sortedness and injectivity, as well as Boolean combinations of periodic and
arithmetic facts relating the elements of the sequence and their positions
(e.g., "for all even i's, the element at position i has value i+3 or 2i"). The
resulting expressive power is orthogonal to that of the most expressive
decidable logics for arrays. Some examples demonstrate that the fragment is
also suitable to reason about sequence-manipulating programs within the
standard framework of axiomatic semantics.Comment: Fixed a few lapses in the Mergesort exampl
Construction of weakly CUD sequences for MCMC sampling
In Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling considerable thought goes into
constructing random transitions. But those transitions are almost always driven
by a simulated IID sequence. Recently it has been shown that replacing an IID
sequence by a weakly completely uniformly distributed (WCUD) sequence leads to
consistent estimation in finite state spaces. Unfortunately, few WCUD sequences
are known. This paper gives general methods for proving that a sequence is
WCUD, shows that some specific sequences are WCUD, and shows that certain
operations on WCUD sequences yield new WCUD sequences. A numerical example on a
42 dimensional continuous Gibbs sampler found that some WCUD inputs sequences
produced variance reductions ranging from tens to hundreds for posterior means
of the parameters, compared to IID inputs.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS162 the Electronic
Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
The real numbers - a survey of constructions
We present a comprehensive survey of constructions of the real numbers (from
either the rationals or the integers) in a unified fashion, thus providing an
overview of most (if not all) known constructions ranging from the earliest
attempts to recent results, and allowing for a simple comparison-at-a-glance
between different constructions
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