Alon Orlitsky

Information theorist at UC San Diego and lead author of "Optimal prediction of the number of unseen species" (PNAS 113(47), 2016; the authors' own arXiv preprint carries the subtitle "A bird in the hand is worth log n in the bush"), which proved that the number of species unseen in a sample of size n can be predicted reliably up to roughly n·log n further observations, and that this range is provably optimal via a matching minimax lower bound. He matters to this vault as the primary author behind a claim it had been carrying only via a hop's paraphrase of the paper's abstract: a direct read of his own preprint confirmed the core bound and also caught a misattribution the vault had made — crediting his paper's own title to a different, concurrent author.

References

• claim-unseen-mass-is-predictable-only-to-n-log-n (revised in place, 2026-08-25)
• claim-orlitsky-suresh-wu-nlogn-horizon-proven-optimal-via-matched-minimax-lower-bound
• claim-valiant-2015-nlogn-range-matches-osw-but-error-metric-exponentially-weaker
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-25-verify-the-nlog-n-unseen-prediction-horizon-and.md