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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…

History and Overview · Mathematics 2021-08-06 Niklas Braband , Sonja Braband , Malte Braband

We address a conjecture of Schilling concerning the optimality of the uniform distribution in the generalized Coupon Collector's Problem (CCP) where, in each round, a subset (package) of $s$ coupons is drawn from a total of $n$ distinct…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Daniel Berend , Tomer Sher

Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Mo Yu , Shiyu Chang , Yang Zhang , Tommi S. Jaakkola

This paper is about the Coupon collector's problem. There are some coupons, or baseball cards, or other plastic knick-knacks that are put into bags of chips or under soda bottles, etc. A collector starts collecting these trinkets and wants…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-03-11 Rohit Pandey

In this paper, we study the problem of Participatory Budgeting (PB) with approval ballots, inspired by Multi-Winner Voting schemes. We present generalized preference aggregation methods for participatory budgeting, especially for finding…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Rutvik Page , Arnav Doifode , Jitendra Tembhurne , Aishwarya Sagar Anand Ukey

This note describes an algorithm for enumerating all the elements in a finite set based on uniformly random sampling from the set. This algorithm can be used for enumeration by fair sampling with quantum annealing. Our algorithm is based on…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-04-06 Yuta Mizuno , Tamiki Komatsuzaki

This article describes a purely analytic approach to urn models of the generalized or extended P\'olya-Eggenberger type, in the case of two types of balls and constant ``balance,'' that is, constant row sum. The treatment starts from a…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Philippe Flajolet , Joaquim Gabarro , Helmut Pekari

We consider the following variant of the classic collector's problem: The family of coupon probabilities is the mixing of two subfamilies one of which is the \textit{uniform} family, while the other belongs to the well known \textit{Zipf…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-04-23 Aristides V. Doumas , Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

The problem 2-Xor-Sat asks for the probability that a random expression, built as a conjunction of clauses $x \oplus y$, is satisfiable. We revisit this classical problem by giving an alternative, explicit expression of this probability. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-11-25 Élie de Panafieu , Danièle Gardy , Bernhard Gittenberger , Markus Kuba

In the classical coupon collector's problem, every box of breakfast cereal contains one coupon from a collection of n distinct coupons, each equally likely to appear. The goal is to find the expected number of boxes a player needs to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Tipaluck Krityakierne , Thotsaporn Aek Thanatipanonda

P\'{o}lya urn is a stochastic process in which balls are randomly drawn from an urn of red and blue balls, and balls of the same color as the drawn balls are added. The probability of a ball of a certain color being drawn is equal to the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-11-10 Shintaro Mori , Masato Hisakado , Kazuaki Nakayama

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-10-31 Aristides V. Doumas

We show that probabilistic computable functions, i.e., those functions outputting distributions and computed by probabilistic Turing machines, can be characterized by a natural generalization of Church and Kleene's partial recursive…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-06-26 Ugo Dal Lago , Sara Zuppiroli

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the kernel-based algorithm for gain function approximation in the feedback particle filter. The exact gain function is the solution of a Poisson equation involving a probability-weighted…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-12-19 Amirhossein Taghvaei , Prashant G. Mehta , Sean P. Meyn

We study the coupon collector with deterministic expiration: one coupon is drawn at each time, and each coupon remains active for exactly $M$ draws. Completion occurs when all $n$ coupon types are simultaneously active. Equivalently, the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-30 Christopher D. Long

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2010-06-04 Yao Li , Emina Soljanin , Predrag Spasojevic

A basic question in the PAC model of learning is whether proper learning is harder than improper learning. In the classical case, there are examples of concept classes with VC dimension $d$ that have sample complexity $\Omega\left(\frac…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-03-07 Ashwin Nayak , Pulkit Sinha

Transferring knowledge across a sequence of related tasks is an important challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite much encouraging empirical evidence, there has been little theoretical analysis. In this paper, we study a class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-23 Emma Brunskill , Lihong Li

A collector samples coupons with replacement from a pool containing $g$ \textit{uniform} groups of coupons, where "uniform group" means that all coupons in the group are equally likely to occur. For each $j = 1, \dots, g$ let $T_j$ be the…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-11-13 Aristides V. Doumas , Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-06-19 Christian Berthet