The original PDF shows the chain , not a collider. Its Bayesian network factorization is . For any with positive marginal probability,
Integrating or summing over also gives the same conditional marginal . Thus
This is conditional independence; the graph does not generally imply marginal independence, since summing over can transmit dependence from to . Special statistical parameter choices can make marginal independence hold as well, so the claim is that only the conditional statement is guaranteed by the graph. Conditional distributions on null values of are immaterial to this assertion.
Write for the directed edges from parent to child and for the state at site . The global Markov property for an undirected graph on this tree, together with the specified parent transitions, gives the complete-data likelihood function
One can obtain the factorization by successively removing terminal subtrees: after conditioning on their parent, each subtree is independent of the rest. The root factor and transition products also show that different sites are independent. Only ancestral states are latent variables.
At the current Markov kernel , define expected transition counts
The E-step of the expectation-maximization algorithm is
Maximize separately for each row under and . For , the Lagrange multiplier equation is , with zero-count entries set to zero at a boundary maximum. Thus the EM transition-count update on a tree is
If , that row does not occur in ; any row probability distribution, including its previous value, maximizes the objective.
The expected counts can be computed exactly by the Felsenstein pruning algorithm and an outward belief propagation pass. For one site, let be the conditional probability of observations in the subtree below , given state . For a leaf with observed state , . For an internal vertex,
Define as the joint mass of state at and all observations outside its subtree. The root has . For a child of , put
The edge posterior probability required above is
Multiply the inside and outside factors to obtain the joint mass of the observations and endpoint states; division by the site likelihood function proves this expression. Sum over edges and sites to form . The two passes take operations on a binary tree. Scaling messages or computing them logarithmically avoids underflow.
A strictly positive initial Markov kernel ensures for every observed leaf pattern, so every E-step is defined. At a later boundary iterate, require positive likelihood for the actual data and restrict the conditional distribution to its support. EM likelihood monotonicity proves that the update cannot decrease observed-data likelihood function. It is a maximum-likelihood iteration, not a guarantee of finding the global maximum-likelihood estimate; different initial kernels may lead to different stationary points.
Use the slotted ALOHA model with one outstanding packet per active station and a collision channel: a slot with exactly one attempt succeeds, whereas an idle slot or a slot with two or more attempts delivers nothing. Let be independent Poisson random variables of mean , independent also of the transmission choices. Arrivals join after the current slot's attempts. Given , the attempt count has a binomial distribution with parameters and . Consequently, for ,
For , set and . The equation adds arrivals and removes precisely one packet following a successful slot. The estimate controls the common transmission probability and updates using the idle, success, or collision feedback. The conditional distribution of the next state depends only on , so this pair is a Markov chain.
Away from the reflecting floor in , its one-step conditional expectations are
When and are large with , the Poisson limit theorem gives and . Treating these approximate drifts as derivatives motivates the fluid approximation of slotted ALOHA:
The floor at is negligible in this interior scaling. This calculation motivates the ordinary differential equations; it is not a proof of a stochastic fluid limit.
For , put
Then and . On the domain , introduce time by . Differentiating gives
where .
The function is strictly increasing from zero to infinity, and . To check the monotonicity explicitly,
Indeed, with ,
because its discriminant is ; and . Thus the scalar ordinary differential equation for points toward the unique value satisfying . Every trajectory with , has bounded and . Positivity of follows from .
If , then and . Thus decays exponentially for large , and
This is finite-time draining of a fluid model. The unmodified equations have undefined at the origin, so the statement that trajectories converge to the origin needs this endpoint interpretation; continuing with an absorbing zero trajectory is an additional fluid-model convention, not a solution of the displayed equations at the origin.
If , then and . Now grows exponentially, physical time tends to infinity, and
In particular the trajectory escapes to infinity. Even without the ratio analysis, , since .
For the actual Markov chain, it is essential not to replace the finite- success probability by : a single backlogged packet can succeed with probability one. Instead, for , maximizing over gives the ALOHA throughput bound
If , choose and so that for all , uniformly in . For sufficiently small ,
because its derivative at zero is . Independence of arrivals and attempts gives
whenever . For any integer , stop at the stopping time . The stopped process is a nonnegative supermartingale. The optional stopping theorem, first at bounded times and then by a limit, yields the exponential-supermartingale escape bound
From every state with , a Poisson distribution arrival burst has a uniformly positive probability of sending the next backlog to at least , for any fixed . From there the probability of never revisiting is at least . By the Markov property at successive visits, the probability of infinitely many visits to this strip is zero: each visit has a uniform positive chance of being the last. This holds for every integer , so
Therefore the Markov chain is transient for every finite choice of . The proof is uniform in and does not infer stochastic transience merely from the approximate ordinary differential equations.
Given the parameters and , the coordinates are conditionally independent. Write , , and let denote the observed count. Their full conditional distributions have scalar densities
Each is proper: the binomial distribution likelihood factor is bounded, and the remaining factor is a proper normal distribution density.
One completely specified exact algorithm is rejection sampling from . Define
For ,
for or , take , and for take . Propose and accept with probability , repeating until acceptance. The accepted density is proportional to the proposal times , exactly . Its acceptance probability is positive, so it terminates almost surely, although it can be inefficient.
An efficient exact alternative is adaptive rejection sampling. The log density has
Thus it is a log-concave probability density. Choose one tangent point with positive derivative in the left tail and one with negative derivative in the right tail; these exist because the Gaussian term dominates there. Their tangent upper hull gives an integrable piecewise exponential rejection envelope. Sample that envelope, accept using the target-to-envelope ratio, and add evaluated points to improve it. Concavity guarantees the upper bound, so accepted samples remain exact. Sample each coordinate independently by either method; a finite number of Metropolis steps would not provide the requested exact draws.
Let be the probability density function of the unknown and that of the noise, both relative to Lebesgue measure. By independence of random variables, the conditional distribution of the measurement given has density . Thus its likelihood function and the joint density are
The Bayesian model evidence is the marginal data density
Bayes theorem gives the posterior density solving this Bayesian inverse problem:
This formula applies when . Since by Tonelli theorem, these conditions hold almost everywhere under the marginal data law. Values of a conditional distribution at exceptional data are not determined by the joint law. The posterior mean or a maximum a posteriori estimate can then give a point estimate, while the full posterior density describes the remaining uncertainty.
Use the shape-rate convention for the Gamma distribution. Define
The zero null space assumption makes a positive-definite matrix, and is the unique ordinary least squares solution. The Gaussian likelihood contributes , which must be retained because is unknown. Multiplying it by the improper prior and the Gamma distribution gives the normal-gamma posterior with a flat prior:
Here the constant density of the improper prior cancels on normalization. Put
The normal equation makes the residual orthogonal to the range of . The orthogonal decomposition by a closed subspace into that range and its orthogonal complement gives
Integration over by the Gaussian integral, followed by integration over using the Gamma distribution, yields
Thus the posterior distribution is proper, despite the improper prior; here follows from the zero null space assumption.
Completing the square in and collecting the powers of give the two conditional distributions:
Explicitly their probability density functions are
For a joint maximum a posteriori estimate relative to , first fix . The unique maximizing is . The remaining log density is plus a constant. Consequently, if ,
The stated assumptions do not always imply . If , the supremum occurs as but is not attained on ; if , the density is unbounded there. In either case there is no joint maximum a posteriori estimate in the stated parameter space. Calling zero a boundary mode does not make it an admissible positive precision.
If “MAP estimators” instead means separate modes of the marginal distributions, integration gives
Thus the marginal maximum a posteriori estimate of is always , and that of is when , with the same nonattainment at zero when . Joint and marginal maximization are different operations; the usual joint interpretation gives the preceding boxed pair.
The notation denotes generalized Gaussian white noise over , not a Gaussian measure supported on : the identity is not a trace-class operator there. For example, realize the observation on a suitable space of tempered distributions. Its Cameron-Martin space of a Gaussian measure is . For deterministic , the stochastic pairing has normal distribution under and is the isonormal Gaussian process indexed by .
Interpret the stated maps between Sobolev spaces as bounded linear operators, as usual. In particular is bounded, so its adjoint operator is bounded on . Hence maps into , which is the property needed here. The stronger smoothing follows by Sobolev duality: boundedness of gives , and therefore . As , the shift belongs to the noise Cameron-Martin space of a Gaussian measure for -almost every .
The white-noise likelihood for a square-integrable shift, obtained from the Cameron-Martin theorem for a Gaussian measure in its white-noise form, is
Here is the law of . In an orthonormal basis of , with white-noise coordinates , the pairing under is
For fixed this has mean-square convergence and converges almost surely, since . The stipulated joint measurability allows the likelihood to be used under . One must not replace this expression by a finite , because white noise is not -valued. On the unbounded domain , membership of white noise in a global unweighted negative Sobolev space must not be assumed either; the stochastic pairing avoids that issue.
Let be the actual joint law. The shift formula gives with Radon-Nikodym derivative . Define
For each fixed admissible , the moment-generating function of a normal distribution gives
By Tonelli theorem, , so for -almost every . The likelihood is finite and strictly positive for -almost every ; Fubini's theorem then gives for -almost every . The marginal observation law is and is an equivalent probability measure to .
The Bayes formula for a dominated observation model therefore defines
To verify that it is the conditional distribution, for measurable sets of unknowns and of data,
Thus the posterior distribution is well defined for almost every observation under the actual data law. This is the appropriate almost-everywhere assertion supplied by Bayes theorem; the stated assumptions do not prescribe a canonical posterior at every exceptional generalized datum.
Use Shamir's secret sharing over the finite field . The Chair independently chooses from the uniform distribution on a finite set and forms the random polynomial
Choose distinct nonzero , with equal to the number of discs to be issued, and inscribe on disc .
Any discs give distinct values of a polynomial of degree at most . Their Vandermonde determinant is nonzero, so polynomial interpolation recovers uniquely and hence recovers the secret as .
Conversely, fix any observed discs and any candidate secret . Interpolating through those points and gives exactly one polynomial of degree at most . Thus every candidate is compatible with the observed discs in exactly the same number of ways. Because the coefficients were chosen uniformly, the conditional distribution of the secret is unchanged after seeing any discs. This proves the Perfect secrecy of Shamir's threshold scheme.
For a distribution in an extreme-value domain of attraction, the conditional distribution of the excess above a high threshold is asymptotically approximated by a generalized Pareto distribution with a threshold-dependent scale and a limiting shape parameter. This theorem justifies the peaks-over-threshold method. Threshold selection must balance approximation error against the reduced number of excess observations.
Regression model 2026-10-07
A regression model specifies features of the conditional distribution of a response given predictor covariates, often a conditional mean or a full parametric density. Linear regression specifies a linear conditional mean; logistic regression specifies a logit-linear conditional probability for a binary response. The conditional comparison represented by a coefficient depends on which covariates are included.