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Browse the failure-mode index

155 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Mathematics. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Algorithmic identification of probabilities is hard

Laurent Bienvenu, Santiago Figueira, Benoit Monin et al. · 2014 · arXiv

Suppose that we are given an infinite binary sequence which is random for a Bernoulli measure of parameter $p$. By the law of large numbers, the frequency of zeros in the sequence tends to~$p$, and thus we can get better and better approximations of $p$ as we read the sequence. We study in this paper a similar question, but from the viewpoint of inductive inference. We suppose now that $p$ is a computable real, but one asks for more: as we are reading more and more bits of our random sequence, we have to eventually guess the exact parameter $p$ (in the form of a Turing code). Can one do such a

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessMathematics

Small-time local control of a Schrödinger equation: a negative and a positive quadratic result

Karine Beauchard, Frédéric Marbach, Thomas Perrin · 2025 · arXiv

We study the small-time local controllability (STLC) of a bilinear Schrödinger equation with Neumann boundary conditions near its ground state. We focus on the degenerate case where the linearized system is not controllable, necessitating a second-order analysis. We prove two complementary results. The negative result provides a new PDE instance of Sussmann's classical quadratic obstruction, corresponding to a non-vanishing Lie bracket. The positive result appears to be the first to establish STLC at the quadratic order for a physical PDE with a single scalar control. Both proofs rely on a Fou

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Solutions to multi-marginal optimal transport problems concentrated on several graphs

Abbas Moameni, Brendan Pass · 2015 · arXiv

We study solutions to the multi-marginal Monge-Kantorovich problem which are concentrated on several graphs over the first marginal. We first present two general conditions on the cost function which ensure, respectively, that any solution must concentrate on either finitely many or countably many graphs. We show that local differential conditions on the cost, known to imply local $d$-rectifiability of the solution, are sufficient to imply a local version of the first of our conditions. We exhibit two examples of cost functions satisfying our conditions, including the Coulomb cost from density

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Covariant Functors and Asymptotic Stability

Tony Se · 2015 · arXiv

Let R be a commutative Noetherian ring, I and J ideals of R and M a finitely generated R-module. Let F be a covariant R-linear functor from the category of finitely generated R-modules to itself. We first show that if F is coherent, then the sets of associated primes of F(M/I^n M) and F(I^n-1 M / I^n M) and the J-depths of F(M/I^n M) and F(I^n-1 M / I^n M) become independent of n for large n. Next, we consider several examples in which F is a rather familiar functor, but is not coherent or not even finitely generated in general. In these cases, the set of associated primes of F(M/I^n M) still

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Abandoned HypothesisOpen accessMathematics

Stone duality above dimension zero: Axiomatising the algebraic theory of C(X)

Vincenzo Marra, Luca Reggio · 2015 · arXiv

It has been known since the work of Duskin and Pelletier four decades ago that KH^op, the category opposite to compact Hausdorff spaces and continuous maps, is monadic over the category of sets. It follows that KH^op is equivalent to a possibly infinitary variety of algebras V in the sense of Slominski and Linton. Isbell showed in 1982 that the Lawvere-Linton algebraic theory of V can be generated using a finite number of finitary operations, together with a single operation of countably infinite arity. In 1983, Banaschewski and Rosicky independently proved a conjecture of Bankston, establishi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Replication of "null results" -- Absence of evidence or evidence of absence?

Samuel Pawel, Rachel Heyard, Charlotte Micheloud et al. · 2023 · arXiv

In several large-scale replication projects, statistically non-significant results in both the original and the replication study have been interpreted as a "replication success". Here we discuss the logical problems with this approach: Non-significance in both studies does not ensure that the studies provide evidence for the absence of an effect and "replication success" can virtually always be achieved if the sample sizes are small enough. In addition, the relevant error rates are not controlled. We show how methods, such as equivalence testing and Bayes factors, can be used to adequately qu

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Calibrating the Brody exponent as a quantitative measure of short-range exclusion in 2D spatial point processes

Dawid Kucharski · 2026 · arXiv

The Brody distribution, originally a phenomenological interpolation between Poisson and Wigner level-spacing statistics in quantum chaos, is calibrated here as a quantitative measure of short-range exclusion in 2D spatial point processes. Two results form the core. First, the 2D complete-spatial-randomness baseline is recalibrated to $β=0.96\pm0.15$, correcting the inappropriate 1D Poisson reference. Second, an empirical $β$--$r_{\text{excl}}$ calibration is validated against the effective hard-core radius with Spearman $ρ=0.988$. The framework is demonstrated on 58 manufactured surfaces (10 m

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Understanding the Characteristics of Frequent Users of Emergency Departments: What Role Do Medical Conditions Play?

Jens Rauch, Jens Hüsers, Birgit Babitsch et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Frequent users of emergency departments (ED) pose a significant challenge to hospital emergency services. Despite a wealth of studies in this field, it is hardly understood, what medical conditions lead to frequent attendance. We examine (1) what ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC) are linked to frequent use, (2) how frequent users can be clustered into subgroups with respect to their diagnoses, acuity and admittance, and (3) whether frequent use is related to higher acuity or admission rate. We identified several ACSC that highly increase the risk for heavy ED use, extracted four majo

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Urgent Samples in Clinical Laboratories: Stochastic Batching to Minimize Patient Turnaround Time

Antonin Novak, Andrzej Gnatowski, Premysl Sucha · 2025 · arXiv

This paper addresses the problem of batching laboratory samples in hospital laboratories where samples of different priorities are received continuously with uncertain transportation times. The focus is on optimizing the control strategy for loading a centrifuge to minimize patient turnaround time (TAT). While focusing on samples of patients in life-threatening situations (i.e., vital samples), we propose several online and offline methods, including a stochastic mixed-integer quadratic programming model integrated within a discrete-event system simulation. This paper aims to enhance patient c

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Squintability and Other Metrics for Assessing Projection Pursuit Indexes, and Guiding Optimization Choices

H. Sherry Zhang, Dianne Cook, Nicolas Langrené et al. · 2024 · arXiv

The projection pursuit (PP) guided tour optimizes a criterion function, known as the PP index, to gradually reveal projections of interest from high-dimensional data through animation. Optimization of some PP indexes can be non-trivial, if they are non-smooth functions, or when the optimum has a small "squint angle", detectable only from close proximity. Here, measures for calculating the smoothness and squintability properties of the PP index are defined. These are used to investigate the performance of a recently introduced swarm-based algorithm, Jellyfish Search Optimizer (JSO), for optimiz

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Commutation Error in Reduced Order Modeling of Fluid Flows

Birgul Koc, Muhammad Mohebujjaman, Changhong Mou et al. · 2018 · arXiv

For reduced order models (ROMs) of fluid flows, we investigate theoretically and computationally whether differentiation and ROM spatial filtering commute, i.e., whether the commutation error (CE) is nonzero. We study the CE for the Laplacian and two ROM filters: the ROM projection and the ROM differential filter. Furthermore, when the CE is nonzero, we investigate whether it has any significant effect on ROMs that are constructed by using spatial filtering. As numerical tests, we use the Burgers equation with viscosities $ν=10^{-1}$ and $ν=10^{-3}$ and a 2D flow past a circular cylinder at Re

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Research on spatial information transmission efficiency and capability of safe evacuation signs

Ruiwen Fan, Zhangyin Dai, Shixiang Tian et al. · 2022 · arXiv

As an indispensable spatial direction information indicator for emergency evacuation, the spatial relationship between safety evacuation signs and evacuees will affect the response time of evacuees and the evacuation efficiency. This paper takes 2 kinds of common safety evacuation signs, hangtag-type and embedded, as the research object and designs space direction information transmission efficiency and capability simulation experiment and fire drill, the efficiency and capability of spatial direction information transmission of safety evacuation signs are studied. The results show that the sp

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Forecasting Multivariate Time Series under Predictive Heterogeneity: A Validation-Driven Clustering Framework

Ziling Ma, Ángel López Oriona, Hernando Ombao et al. · 2026 · arXiv

We study adaptive pooling under predictive heterogeneity in high-dimensional multivariate time series forecasting, where global models improve statistical efficiency but may fail to capture heterogeneous predictive structure, while naive specialization can induce negative transfer. We formulate adaptive pooling as a statistical decision problem and propose a validation-driven framework that determines when and how specialization should be applied. Rather than grouping series based on representation similarity, we define partitions through out-of-sample predictive performance, thereby aligning

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Inference in matrix-valued time series with common stochastic trends and multifactor error structure

Rong Chen, Simone Giannerini, Greta Goracci et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We develop an estimation methodology for a factor model for high-dimensional matrix-valued time series, where common stochastic trends and common stationary factors can be present. We study, in particular, the estimation of (row and column) loading spaces, of the common stochastic trends and of the common stationary factors, and the row and column ranks thereof. In a set of (negative) preliminary results, we show that a projection-based technique fails to improve the rates of convergence compared to a "flattened" estimation technique which does not take into account the matrix nature of the da

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Private Parking Space Sharing Intention in China: An Empirical Study Based on the MIMIC Model

Ange Wang, Hongzhi Guan, Yan Han et al. · 2021 · Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society

The shared parking scheme improves the utilization rate of existing parking resources and contributes to the sustainable development of cities, but many private parking spaces that are not included in the shared parking scheme have a low utilization rate in China. In order to better promote the shared parking scheme, it is necessary to study the intention of the owners of private parking spaces to share their parking spaces. Therefore, this paper used the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and Benefit-Risk Analysis Model (BRA) as the combined theoretical framework (C-UT

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Non-Isothermal Hydrodynamic Characteristics of a Nanofluid in a Fin-Attached Rotating Tube Bundle

Mashhour A. Alazwari, Mohammad Reza Safaei · 2021 · Mathematics

In the present study, a novel configuration of a rotating tube bundle was simulated under non-isothermal hydrodynamic conditions using a mixture model. Eight fins were considered in this study, which targeted the hydrodynamics of the system. An aqueous copper nanofluid was used as the heat transfer fluid. Various operating factors, such as rotation speed (up to 500 rad/s), Reynolds number (10–80), and concentration of the nanofluid (0.0–4.0%) were applied, and the performance of the microchannel heat exchanger was assessed. It was found that the heat transfer coefficient of the system could be

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Winter wheat yield and yield components as affected by soil tillage systems

I. Jug, D. Jug, M. Sabo et al. · 2011 · Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences

Eight different soil tillage systems (TS) for winter wheat after soybean crop production were compared at the chernozem soil type in Croatian Baranya region in a 4-year period (2001/2002, 2002/2003, 2003/2004, 2004/2005). Tillage systems…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Phase limitations of multipliers at harmonics

William Paul Heath, Joaquin Carrasco, Jingfan Zhang · 2021 · arXiv

We present a phase condition under which there is no suitable multiplier for a given continuous-time plant. The condition can be derived from either the duality approach or from the frequency interval approach. The condition has a simple graphical interpretation, can be tested in a numerically efficient manner and may be applied systematically. Numerical examples show significant improvement over existing results in the literature. The condition is used to demonstrate a third order system with delay that is a counterexample to the Kalman Conjecture.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Opening the Black Box: Towards inherently interpretable energy data imputation models using building physics insight

Antonio Liguori, Matias Quintana, Chun Fu et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Missing data are frequently observed by practitioners and researchers in the building energy modeling community. In this regard, advanced data-driven solutions, such as Deep Learning methods, are typically required to reflect the non-linear behavior of these anomalies. As an ongoing research question related to Deep Learning, a model's applicability to limited data settings can be explored by introducing prior knowledge in the network. This same strategy can also lead to more interpretable predictions, hence facilitating the field application of the approach. For that purpose, the aim of this

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

From energy bounds to dimensional estimates in a branched transport model for type-I superconductors

Guido De Philippis, Michael Goldman, Berardo Ruffini · 2023 · arXiv

We consider a branched transport type problem which describes the magnetic flux through type-I superconductors in a regime of very weak applied fields. At the boundary of the sample, deviation of the magnetization from being uniform is penalized through a negative Sobolev norm. It was conjectured by S. Conti, F. Otto and S. Serfaty that as a result, the trace of the magnetization on the boundary should be a measure of Hausdorff dimension $8/5$. We prove that this conjecture is equivalent to the proof of local energy bounds with an optimal exponent. We then obtain local bounds which are however

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Regularizing Recurrent Networks - On Injected Noise and Norm-based Methods

Saahil Ognawala, Justin Bayer · 2014 · arXiv

Advancements in parallel processing have lead to a surge in multilayer perceptrons' (MLP) applications and deep learning in the past decades. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) give additional representational power to feedforward MLPs by providing a way to treat sequential data. However, RNNs are hard to train using conventional error backpropagation methods because of the difficulty in relating inputs over many time-steps. Regularization approaches from MLP sphere, like dropout and noisy weight training, have been insufficiently applied and tested on simple RNNs. Moreover, solutions have been

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Hybrid Probabilistic-Snowball Sampling

Giulio Cantone, Venera Tomaselli · 2022 · arXiv

Snowball sampling is the common name for sampling designs on human populations where respondents are requested to share the questionnaire among their social ties. With some exceptions, estimates from snowball samplings are considered biased. However, the magnitude of the bias is influenced by a combination of elements of the sampling design and features of the target population. Hybrid Probabilistic-Snowball Sampling Designs (HPSSD) aims to reduce the main source of bias in the snowball sample through randomly oversampling the first stage 0 of the snowball. To check the behaviour of HPSSD for

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

A comparison of short-term probabilistic forecasts for the incidence of COVID-19 using mechanistic and statistical time series models

Nicolas Banholzer, Thomas Mellan, H Juliette T Unwin et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Short-term forecasts of infectious disease spread are a critical component in risk evaluation and public health decision making. While different models for short-term forecasting have been developed, open questions about their relative performance remain. Here, we compare short-term probabilistic forecasts of popular mechanistic models based on the renewal equation with forecasts of statistical time series models. Our empirical comparison is based on data of the daily incidence of COVID-19 across six large US states over the first pandemic year. We find that, on average, probabilistic forecast

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Towards Sharp Minimax Risk Bounds for Operator Learning

Ben Adcock, Gregor Maier, Rahul Parhi · 2025 · arXiv

We develop a minimax theory for operator learning, where the goal is to estimate an unknown operator between separable Hilbert spaces from finitely many noisy input-output samples. For uniformly bounded Lipschitz operators, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds together with matching or near-matching upper bounds, covering both fixed and random designs under Hilbert-valued Gaussian noise and Gaussian white noise errors. The rates are controlled by the spectrum of the covariance operator of the measure that defines the error metric. Our setup is very general and allows for measures with u

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Replication FailureOpen accessMathematics

Mixing on $k$ Columns of the Transvection Walk

Natesh Pillai, Aaron Smith · 2026 · arXiv

In Diaconis and Saloff-Coste (1996), the authors introduced the simple ``transvection" walk on $\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbb F_2)$: at each step, choose two distinct rows and add one to the other. In Ben-Hamou (2025), the author recently proved that this walk has mixing time $O(n^2\log n)$. Inspired by applications in cryptography (see Sotiraki (2016)), Ben-Hamou and Peres (2018) conjectured that the first $k$ columns of this walk mixed in $O(nk \log(n))$ steps. Our main result is a proof of this conjecture uniformly in $n$ and $k.$ Our proof is based on a local-to-global entropy estimate, in the spi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

ScoreStop: Gradient-based early stopping using functional score tests

Oliver J. Hines, Christian L. Hines · 2026 · arXiv

Gradient boosted decision trees require a stopping rule to avoid overfitting. The standard rule monitors a validation loss and stops if the loss fails to improve for a fixed patience period. However, the patience parameter has no interpretable scale and validation losses can be noisy or implicitly defined by a user-specified gradient. We propose ScoreStop, a gradient-based early-stopping rule that casts the stopping decision at each iteration as a test of the null hypothesis that the current predictor is the population risk minimizer. We use a functional score test, computed on validation data

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Time to adjust: Improving replicability in experimental psychology by adjustment for evident selective inference

Yoav Zeevi, Sofi Astashenko, Liad Mudrik et al. · 2020 · arXiv

The field of psychological sciences has been grappling with the replicability crisis. Various issues have been identified as potential sources of this problem. We bring to light a potential source that has largely been overlooked and demonstrate its significant contribution to the problem: the practice of multiple comparisons. We analyzed 88 papers from the Reproducibility Project in Psychology and found that multiple results are commonly reported in a single paper, ranging from 4 to 730 (M=77.7), without multiple comparison adjustments. We retroactively applied such an adjustment using a hier

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Bias and response heterogeneity in an air quality data set

S. Stanley Young, Robert L. Obenchain, Christophe Lambert · 2015 · arXiv

It is well-known that claims coming from observational studies often fail to replicate when rigorously re-tested. The technical problems include multiple testing, multiple modeling and bias. Any or all of these problems can give rise to claims that will fail to replicate. There is a need for statistical methods that are easily applied, are easy to understand, and are likely to give reliable results. In particular, simple ways for reducing the influence of bias are essential. In this paper, the Local Control method developed by Robert Obenchain is explicated using a small air quality/longevity

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Causal Stability Selection

Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi, Omar Melikechi · 2026 · arXiv

Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious findings that fail to replicate. We introduce causal stability selection, an algorithm that combines cross-fitted estimation of conditional average treatment effects with integrated path stability selection. The method accommodates arbitrary treatment effect estimators and arbitrary base selectors, and produces a selection set with an explicit, non-asymptotic boun

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