Immigrated urn models - asymptotic properties and applications

Li-Xin Zhang, Feifang Hu, Siu Hung Cheung, Wei Sum Chan

Published 2008-12-19, updated 2011-03-11Version 2

Urn models have been widely studied and applied in both scientific and social science disciplines. In clinical studies, the adoption of urn models in treatment allocation schemes has been proved to be beneficial to both researchers, by providing more efficient clinical trials, and patients, by increasing the likelihood of receiving the better treatment. In this paper, we propose a new and general class of immigrated urn (IMU) models that incorporates the immigration mechanism into the urn process. Theoretical properties are developed and the advantages of the IMU models are discussed. In general, the IMU models have smaller variabilities than the classical urn models, yielding more powerful statistical inferences in applications. Illustrative examples are presented to demonstrate the wide applicability of the IMU models. The proposed IMU framework, including many popular classical urn models, not only offers a unify perspective for us to comprehend the urn process, but also enables us to generate several novel urn models with desirable properties.