Consider a committee of experts dealing with dichotomous choice problem, where the correctness probabilities are all greater than [InlineMediaObject not available: see fulltext.] We prove that, if a random subcommittee of odd size m is selected randomly, and entrusted to make a decision by...

We give simple, sharp non-asymptotic bounds on the mean absolute deviation (MAD) of a Bin(n,p) random variable. Although MAD is known to behave asymptotically as the standard deviation, the convergence is not uniform over the range of p and fails at the endpoints. Our estimates hold for all...

We give tight lower and upper bounds on the expected missing mass for distributions over finite and countably infinite spaces. An essential characterization of the extremal distributions is given. We also provide an extension to totally bounded metric spaces that may be of independent interest.

Given a graph G and positive integers B and W, the BWC problem asks about the existence of a coloring of G, with B black and W white vertices, such that there is no edge between a black and a white vertex. We suggest a heuristic, based on tabu search, which yields quite good results for this...