666 research outputs found

    Polynomial Triangles Revisited

    Full text link
    A polynomial triangle is an array whose inputs are the coefficients in integral powers of a polynomial. Although polynomial coefficients have appeared in several works, there is no systematic treatise on this topic. In this paper we plan to fill this gap. We describe some aspects of these arrays, which generalize similar properties of the binomial coefficients. Some combinatorial models enumerated by polynomial coefficients, including lattice paths model, spin chain model and scores in a drawing game, are introduced. Several known binomial identities are then extended. In addition, we calculate recursively generating functions of column sequences. Interesting corollaries follow from these recurrence relations such as new formulae for the Fibonacci numbers and Hermite polynomials in terms of trinomial coefficients. Finally, properties of the entropy density function that characterizes polynomial coefficients in the thermodynamical limit are studied in details.Comment: 24 pages with 1 figure eps include

    Gibbs distributions for random partitions generated by a fragmentation process

    Full text link
    In this paper we study random partitions of 1,...n, where every cluster of size j can be in any of w\_j possible internal states. The Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution is obtained by sampling uniformly among such partitions with k clusters. We provide conditions on the weight sequence w allowing construction of a partition valued random process where at step k the state has the Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution, so the partition is subject to irreversible fragmentation as time evolves. For a particular one-parameter family of weight sequences w\_j, the time-reversed process is the discrete Marcus-Lushnikov coalescent process with affine collision rate K\_{i,j}=a+b(i+j) for some real numbers a and b. Under further restrictions on a and b, the fragmentation process can be realized by conditioning a Galton-Watson tree with suitable offspring distribution to have n nodes, and cutting the edges of this tree by random sampling of edges without replacement, to partition the tree into a collection of subtrees. Suitable offspring distributions include the binomial, negative binomial and Poisson distributions.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, version considerably modified. To appear in the Journal of Statistical Physic

    Why Delannoy numbers?

    Full text link
    This article is not a research paper, but a little note on the history of combinatorics: We present here a tentative short biography of Henri Delannoy, and a survey of his most notable works. This answers to the question raised in the title, as these works are related to lattice paths enumeration, to the so-called Delannoy numbers, and were the first general way to solve Ballot-like problems. These numbers appear in probabilistic game theory, alignments of DNA sequences, tiling problems, temporal representation models, analysis of algorithms and combinatorial structures.Comment: Presented to the conference "Lattice Paths Combinatorics and Discrete Distributions" (Athens, June 5-7, 2002) and to appear in the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference

    A hybrid sampler for Poisson-Kingman mixture models

    Get PDF
    This paper concerns the introduction of a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo scheme for posterior sampling in Bayesian nonparametric mixture models with priors that belong to the general Poisson-Kingman class. We present a novel compact way of representing the infinite dimensional component of the model such that while explicitly representing this infinite component it has less memory and storage requirements than previous MCMC schemes. We describe comparative simulation results demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed MCMC algorithm against existing marginal and conditional MCMC samplers
    • …
    corecore