---
title: "Alon Orlitsky"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Alon Orlitsky"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["unseen-species prediction horizon","minimax lower bounds","statistics of the unseen","Ananda Theertha Suresh","Yihong Wu"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


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