Sampling from a mixture of different groups of coupons
Abstract
A collector samples coupons with replacement from a pool containing \textit{uniform} groups of coupons, where "uniform group" means that all coupons in the group are equally likely to occur. For each let be the number of trials needed to detect Group , namely to collect all coupons belonging to it at least once. We derive an explicit formula for the probability that the -th group is the first one to be detected (symbolically, ). We also compute the asymptotics of this probability in the case as the number of coupons grows to infinity in a certain manner. Then, in the case of two groups we focus on , i.e. the number of trials needed to collect all coupons of the pool (at least once). We determine the asymptotics of and , as well as the limiting distribution of (appropriately normalized) as the number of coupons becomes very large.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1709.04500,
title = {Sampling from a mixture of different groups of coupons},
author = {Aristides V. Doumas and Vassilis G. Papanicolaou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.04500},
year = {2018}
}
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36 pages