On a generalisation of the coupon collector problem
Abstract
We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector problem. We define a super-coupon to be any -subset of a universe of coupons. In each round, a random -subset from the universe is drawn and all its -subsets are marked as collected. We show that the time to collect all super-coupons is on average and has a Gumbel limit after a suitable normalisation. In a similar vein, we show that for any , the expected time to collect proportion of all super-coupons is . The case of this model is equivalent to the classical coupon collector model. We also consider a temporally dependent model where the -subsets are drawn according to the following Markovian dynamics: the -subset at round is formed by replacing a random coupon from the -subset drawn at round with another random coupon from outside this -subset. We link the time it takes to collect all super-coupons in the case of this model to the cover time of random walk on a certain finite regular graph and conjecture that in general, it takes time on average to collect all super-coupons.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2304.01145,
title = {On a generalisation of the coupon collector problem},
author = {Siva Athreya and Satyaki Mukherjee and Soumendu Sundar Mukherjee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.01145},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
16 pages, 4 figures