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Optimal stopping problems can be found in areas of statistics, economics, and mathematical finance (related to the pricing of American options). A key example of an optimal stopping problem is the secretary problem .
Graphs of probabilities of getting the best candidate (red circles) from n applications, and k/n (blue crosses) where k is the sample size. The secretary problem demonstrates a scenario involving optimal stopping theory [1] [2] that is studied extensively in the fields of applied probability, statistics, and decision theory.
Suppose further that the walk stops if it reaches 0 or m ≥ a; the time at which this first occurs is a stopping time. If it is known that the expected time at which the walk ends is finite (say, from Markov chain theory), the optional stopping theorem predicts that the expected stop position is equal to the initial position a.
In decision theory, the odds algorithm (or Bruss algorithm) is a mathematical method for computing optimal strategies for a class of problems that belong to the domain of optimal stopping problems. Their solution follows from the odds strategy, and the importance of the odds strategy lies in its optimality, as explained below.
Newton's method uses curvature information (i.e. the second derivative) to take a more direct route. In calculus, Newton's method (also called Newton–Raphson) is an iterative method for finding the roots of a differentiable function, which are solutions to the equation =.
Backward induction is the process of determining a sequence of optimal choices by reasoning from the endpoint of a problem or situation back to its beginning using individual events or actions. [1] Backward induction involves examining the final point in a series of decisions and identifying the optimal process or action required to arrive at ...
Fermat and Lagrange found calculus-based formulae for identifying optima, while Newton and Gauss proposed iterative methods for moving towards an optimum. The term "linear programming" for certain optimization cases was due to George B. Dantzig, although much of the theory had been introduced by Leonid Kantorovich in 1939.
A simple suboptimal rule, which performs almost as well as the optimal rule within the class of memoryless stopping rules, was proposed by Krieger & Samuel-Cahn. [7] The rule stops with the smallest i {\displaystyle i} such that R i < i c / ( n + i ) {\displaystyle R_{i}<ic/(n+i)} for a given constant c, where R i {\displaystyle R_{i}} is the ...