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A collector wishes to collect $m$ complete sets of $N$ distinct coupons. The draws from the population are considered to be independent and identical distributed with replacement, and the probability that a type-$j$ coupon is drawn is noted…
The following variant of the collector's problem has attracted considerable attention relatively recently (see, e.g., N. Pintacuda 1980, D. Foata H. Guo-Niu and B. Lass 2001, D. Foata and D. Zeilberger 2003, I. Adler, S. Oren and S. Ross…
The "double Dixie cup problem" of D.J. Newman and L. Shepp (1960) is a well-known variant of the coupon collector's problem, where the object of study is the number $T_{m}(N)$ of coupons that a collector has to buy in order to complete $m$…
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…
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…
The article explores the asymptotic behavior of the expected number of drawings in the Coupon Collector's Problem with group-drawing under the uniform distribution. In this variant, each draw consists of a package of $s$ distinct coupons…
A popular variant of the collector's problem is the following: Assume there are $N$ different types of coupons with equal occurring probabilities. There is one main collector who collects coupons. When she gets a "double," she gives it to…
This Ph.D. thesis concerns the version of the classical coupon collector's problem, when a collector samples with replacement a set of $n\ge 2$ distinct coupons so that at each time any one of the $n$ coupons is drawn with the same…
We study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in determining the distribution and the moments of the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an…
In this note, we introduce a distributed twist on the classic coupon collector problem: a set of $m$ collectors wish to each obtain a set of $n$ coupons; for this, they can each sample coupons uniformly at random, but can also meet in…
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…
The sequential sampling of populations with unequal probabilities and with replacement in a closed population is a recurrent problem in ecology and evolution. Many of these questions can be reformulated as urn problems, often as special…
In this note we evaluate the expected waiting time to complete a collection of coupons, in the case of coupons which arrives in groups of constant size, independently and with unequal probabilities. As an application we will be able to…
We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector's problem, in which at each time step a collector either receives a new copy of a randomly chosen coupon, or loses all their previously collected copies of that coupon. We…
Motivated by applications in bioinformatics, we consider the word collector problem, i.e. the expected number of calls to a random weighted generator of words of length $n$ before the full collection is obtained. The originality of this…
We extend the classical coupon collector's problem to one in which two collectors are simultaneously and independently seeking collections of $d$ coupons. We find, in finite terms, the probability that the two collectors finish at the same…
Consider the coupon collector problem where each box of a brand of cereal contains a coupon and there are n different types of coupons. Suppose that the probability of a box containing a coupon of a specific type is $1/n$ and that we keep…
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…
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 study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in analyzing the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an arbitrary probability distribution. We…