Related papers: The logarithmic Zipf version of the coupon collect…
Computer-based tests with randomly generated questions allow a large number of different tests to be generated. Given a fixed number of alternatives for each question, the number of tests that need to be generated before all possible…
The classic Coupon-Collector Problem (CCP) is generalized to the extent that each coupons serves certain "purposes". Only basic probability theory is used. Centerpiece rather is an algorithm that efficiently counts all $k$-element…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
To approximate the trajectories of a stochastic process by the solution of some differential equation is widely used in the fields of probability, computer science and combinatorics. In this paper, the convergence of coupon collecting…
Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…
Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in…
This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…
A natural problem in the context of the coupon collector's problem is the behavior of the maximum of independent geometrically distributed random variables (with distinct parameters). This question has been addressed by Brennan et al.…
Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…
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…
The solution of the classical Coupon Collector's Problem is based on the assumptions that all stickers are independently and uniformly distributed. We can prove statistically as well as analytically that in particular the assumption of…
In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…
Based upon inequalities on Subset Probabilities, proofs of several conjectures on the Generalized Coupon Collector Problem (i.e. CCP with unequal popularity) are presented. Then we derive a very simple asymptotic relation between the…
Given a set of coins arranged in a line, we remove heads-up coins one at a time and flip any adjacent coins after each removal. The coin-removal problem is to determine for which arrangements of coins it is possible to remove all of the…
The Coupon Collector's Problem is one of the few mathematical problems that make news headlines regularly. The reasons for this are on one hand the immense popularity of soccer albums (called Paninimania) and on the other hand that no…
We are concerned with the general problem of proving the existence of joint distributions of two discrete random variables $M$ and $N$ subject to infinitely many constraints of the form $\mathbb{P}\left(M=i,N=j\right)=0$. In particular, the…
Probabilistic programming and the formal analysis of probabilistic algorithms are active areas of research, driven by the widespread use of randomness to improve performance. While functional correctness has seen substantial progress,…
In "Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence", Gilbert and Mosteller analyze a full information game where n measurements from an uniform distribution are drawn and a player (knowing n) must decide at each draw whether or not to choose that…
We study exploration properties of a random walk on a network. For a fully connected network we find that the problem can be mapped to the well known coupon collector problem, thus allowing us to estimate form of $P(S,t)$: the distribution…
We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…