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Curiosities regarding waiting times in Pólya’s urn model

Henze, Norbert ORCID iD icon; Holmes, Mark P.

Abstract:

Consider an urn initially containing $b$ black and $w$ white balls. Select a ball at random and observe its color. If it is black, stop. Otherwise, return the white ball together with another white ball to the urn. Continue selecting at random, each time adding a white ball, until a black ball is selected. Let $T_{b,w}$ denote the number of draws until this happens. Surprisingly, the expectation of $T_{b,w}$ is infinite for the "fair" initial scenario $b$ = $w$ = 1, but finite if $b$ = 2 and $w$ = 10$^9$. In fact, $\mathbb{E}$ = [$T_{b,w}$] is finite if and only if $b$ $\geq$ 2, and the variance of $T_{b,w}$ is finite if and only if $b$ $\geq$ 3, regardless of the number $w$ of white balls. These observations extend to higher moments.


Originalveröffentlichung
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1911.01052
Zugehörige Institution(en) am KIT Institut für Stochastik (STOCH)
Publikationstyp Forschungsbericht/Preprint
Publikationsjahr 2019
Sprache Englisch
Identifikator KITopen-ID: 1000187910
Verlag arxiv
Umfang 5 S.
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Nachgewiesen in arXiv
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