Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science (Jan 2007)
Distributional asymptotics in the analysis of algorithms: Periodicities and discretization
Abstract
It is well known that many distributions that arise in the analysis of algorithms have an asymptotically fluctuating behaviour in the sense that we do not have 'full' convergence, but only convergence along suitable subsequences as the size of the input to the algorithm tends to infinity. We are interested in constructions that display such behaviour via an ordinarily convergent background process in the sense that the periodicities arise from this process by deterministic transformations, typically involving discretization as a decisive step. This leads to structural representations of the resulting family of limit distributions along subsequences, which in turn may give access to their properties, such as the tail behaviour (unsuccessful search in digital search trees) or the dependence on parameters of the algorithm (success probability in a selection algorithm).
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