Related papers: Collecting Coupons with Random Initial Stake

There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…

We examine the negative occupancy distribution and the coupon-collector distribution, both of which arise as distributions relating to hitting times in the extended occupancy problem. These distributions constitute a full solution to a…

Given a discrete distribution, an interesting problem is to determine the minimum size of a random sample drawn from this distribution, in order to observe a given number of different records. This problem is related with many applied…

Let $V$ be an $n$-set, and let $X$ be a random variable taking values in the powerset of $V$. Suppose we are given a sequence of random coupons $X_1, X_2, \ldots $, where the $X_i$ are independent random variables with distribution given by…

We study the unit-demand capacitated vehicle routing problem in the random setting of the Euclidean plane. The objective is to visit $n$ random terminals in a square using a set of tours of minimum total length, such that each tour visits…

This paper gives an algebraic proof of the correctness of Von Schelling formula for the probability of the coupon collector problem waiting time for non-uniform distributions and partial collections. It introduces a theorem on sums of…

Despite the coupon collector's problem has simple probabilistic solution using inclusion/exclusion principle \cite{PolyaUrn}, starting from a particular type of recurrence differential equation it is used an analytic approach to recover…

The double Dixie cup problem of D.J. Newman and L. Shepp is a well-known variant of the coupon collector problem, where the object of study is the number of coupons that a collector has to buy in order to complete m sets of all N existing…

Let $N_n=\{1,2,...,n\}$. Elements are drawn from the set $N_n$ with replacement, assuming that each element has probability $1/n$ of being drawn. We determine the limiting distributions for the waiting time until the given portion of pairs…

A certain sampling process, concerning an urn with balls of two colors, proposed in 1965 by B.E. Oakley and R.L. Perry, and discussed by Peter Winkler and Martin Gardner, that has an extremely simple answer for the probability, namely the…

The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…

To reduce computational complexity and delay in randomized network coded content distribution (and for some other practical reasons), coding is not performed simultaneously over all content blocks but over much smaller subsets known as…

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Let $\pi_n$ be a uniformly chosen random permutation on $[n]$. The authors of [2] showed that the expected number of distinct consecutive patterns of all lengths $k\in\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ in $\pi_n$ was $\frac{n^2}{2}(1-o(1))$ as $n\to\infty$,…

We prove that, in the coupon collector's problem, the point processes given by the times of $r$-th arrivals for coupons of each type, centered and normalized in a proper way, converge toward a non-homogeneous Poisson point process. This…

We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…

We consider the urn setting with two different objects, ``good'' and ``bad'', and analyze the number of draws without replacement until a good object is picked. Although the expected number of draws for this setting is a standard textbook…

We find a two term asymptotic expansion for the optimal expected value of a sequentially selected monotone subsequence from a random permutation of length n. A striking feature of this expansion is that tells us that the expected value of…

We consider the sorted top-$k$ problem whose goal is to recover the top-$k$ items with the correct order out of $n$ items using pairwise comparisons. In many applications, multiple rounds of interaction can be costly. We restrict our…

Consider an n by n array of cards shuffled in the following manner. An element x of the array is chosen uniformly at random; Then with probability 1/2 the rectangle of cards above and to the left of x is rotated 180 degrees, and with…