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Probability distribution of two numbers randomly changing?

Posted 10 years ago
POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger
11 Replies
Posted 8 years ago

Well, for me this is so obvious that there is no need to answer it. If evolution is not random what else can it be? What is the opposite to random? There are not a lot of alternatives. I don't answer this in the article because I want the reader to answer it for him/herself.

POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger

Interesting article with obviously a lot of work. My knowledge on this topic is almost zero but the direction of the thinking seems to be clear. Perhaps the conclusion is obvious but I felt it's not really clear. You ended your research with:

This is why the time is overdue to unmask this blind passenger, let him row back to his country of origin, the land of fantasy, and open the mind for the obvious origin of the immense and beautiful variety of all vegetal and animal species.

I just wondered, what is the obvious origin you're mentioning? Just curious.

POSTED BY: l van Veen
Posted 8 years ago

In case someone is interested, I published an update on ResearchGate. Do you know a journal that would be interested in publishing this kind of stuff?

POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger
Posted 9 years ago

Hello,

I finally solved all problems and finished my paper. Took a lot of time... I published it on academia.edu. If you are interested, you can see it here. Any comments and suggestions are highly appreciated. You can do this directly in the article.

POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger
POSTED BY: Sjoerd Smit
Posted 9 years ago
POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger
POSTED BY: Sjoerd Smit
Posted 9 years ago
POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger

I get the impression that we don't really understand each other here. Could you repeat your basic problem again, but as clearly as possible? I'm not quite sure I understand what you're actually interested in and what you're doing.

POSTED BY: Sjoerd Smit
Posted 9 years ago
POSTED BY: Ulrich Utiger

The problem you describe sounds like two Markov chains (or discrete-time Markov processes). Each number (call them x and y) occupy a certain state and each step of the process they have a probability m to move to a different state (with each new state being equally likely).

This problem is actually fairly straightforward: the stationary distribution for the process x (or y) follows is simply that x is equally likely to be in any of the given states, so P(x = k) = 1/a. Because the initial value for x is also a uniform random distribution, if follows that x is already in the stationary distribution from the start.

It may sound strange, but the value of m has no influence on this. For example, try this code:

StationaryDistribution[
   DiscreteMarkovProcess[
      {1,0,0,0},
      { 
        {1 - m, m/3, m/3, m/3},
        {m/3, 1 - m, m/3, m/3},
        {m/3, m/3, 1 - m, m/3},
        {m/3, m/3, m/3, 1 - m}
      }
   ]
]

The matrix is the transition matrix of the Markov process (for 4 states in this case). Each entry M_ij is the probability that the next state is j if the current state is i (note that the rows of M sum to 1). As you can see by executing the code, the stationary distribution does not depend on m, but is simply 1/4 for every state. This knowledge should make your problem fairly easy to do, I think.

Of course, if the transition matrix is different (for example, not every state is equally likely to be visited), then the story becomes different. I suggest you read up on Markov chains and processes if you want to know more.

POSTED BY: Sjoerd Smit
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