Related papers: The Labeled Coupon Collector Problem
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…
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…
We study the two-player coupon-collector competition in which two independent collectors draw one coupon each per round from a set of $d$ equally likely coupon types. Myers and Wilf gave finite formulae for several two-player events and…
We study how efficiently a $k$-element set $S\subseteq[n]$ can be learned from a uniform superposition $|S\rangle$ of its elements. One can think of $|S\rangle=\sum_{i\in S}|i\rangle/\sqrt{|S|}$ as the quantum version of a uniformly random…
This paper focuses on the Coupon Collector's Problem with replacement (limited purchasing of missing stickers) and swapping. We have simulated combined strategies and found new results, which we were able to prove for a particular case. 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…
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 change-making problem asks: given a positive integer $v$ and a collection $C$ of integer coin values $c_1=1<c_2< c_3< \cdots< c_n$, what is the minimum number of coins needed to represent $v$ with coin values from $C$? For some coin…
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…
The Coin Change problem, also known as the Change-Making problem, is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem, which involves minimizing the number of coins needed to make a specific change amount using a given set of coin…
A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…
This paper models the crowdsourced labeling/classification problem as a sparsely encoded source coding problem, where each query answer, regarded as a code bit, is the XOR of a small number of labels, as source information bits. In this…
We propose a new method, probabilistic divide-and-conquer, for improving the success probability in rejection sampling. For the example of integer partitions, there is an ideal recursive scheme which improves the rejection cost from…
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…
Label switching is a well-known and fundamental problem in Bayesian estimation of mixture or hidden Markov models. In case that the prior distribution of the model parameters is the same for all states, then both the likelihood and…
We introduce a new technique for designing fixed-parameter algorithms for cut problems, namely randomized contractions. We apply our framework to obtain the first FPT algorithm for the Unique Label Cover problem and new FPT algorithms with…
We define the min-min expectation selection problem (resp. max-min expectation selection problem) to be that of selecting k out of n given discrete probability distributions, to minimize (resp. maximize) the expectation of the minimum value…
We study coverage processes in which each draw reveals a subset of $[n]$, and the goal is to determine the expected number of draws until all items are seen at least once. A classical example is the Coupon Collector's Problem, where each…
The random cost problem is the problem of finding the minimum in an exponentially long list of random numbers. By definition, this problem cannot be solved faster than by exhaustive search. It is shown that a classical NP-hard optimization…
We consider the combinatorial problem where $p$ players aim to a complete set of $N$ different types of items (species) which are uniformly distributed. Let the random variables $T_{N(i)},\,\,i=1,2,\cdots,p$ denoting the number of trials…