English
Related papers

Related papers: Dixie cup problem in an interlacing process

200 papers

The Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) is a well-known combinatorial problem that seeks to estimate the number of random draws required to complete a collection of $n$ distinct coupon types. Various generalizations of this problem have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hadas Abraham , Ido Feldman , Eitan Yaakobi

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Christopher D. Long

We revisit a version of the classic occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown until almost all boxes receive a given number of balls. Special cases are widely known as coupon-collectors and dixie cup problems. We show that as the number of…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-26 Alexander Gnedin , Svante Janson , Yaakov Malinovsky

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-05-13 Vassilis G. Papanicolaou , Aristides V. Doumas

We develop a terminal-defect method for the double Dixie cup problem and use it to prove the finite-variance extremality conjecture of Doumas and Papanicolaou. For every \(m\ge1\) and \(N\ge2\), among all positive coupon probability vectors…

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

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 note we evaluate the expectation and variance of the waiting time to complete $m$ parallel collections of coupons, in the case of coupons which arrives independently, one by one and with equal probabilities.

Probability · Mathematics 2016-09-15 Marco Ferrante , Alessia Tagliavini

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-12-06 Anshui Li , Yong Chen

We study a labeled variant of the classical Coupon Collector Problem (CCP), recently introduced by Tan et al., where coupons arrive in groups and only the set of labels is revealed. The goal is to determine the expected number of group…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Dina Barak-Pelleg , Daniel Berend

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Christian Berthet

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2012-04-18 Jérémie Du Boisberranger , Danièle Gardy , Yann Ponty

The embedding problem of Markov transition matrices into continuous-time Markov semigroups is a classic problem that regained a lot of impetus and activities in recent years. We consider it here for the following generalisation of the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Ellen Baake , Michael Baake

In this article we survey properties of mixed Poisson distributions and probabilistic aspects of the Stirling transform: given a non-negative random variable $X$ with moment sequence $(\mu_s)_{s\in\mathbb{N}}$ we determine a discrete random…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-09-12 Markus Kuba , Alois Panholzer

We consider an extended variant of the classical coupon collector's problem with infinite number of collections. An arriving coupon is placed in the $r^{th}$ collection, $r\ge0$, if $r$ is the smallest index such that the corresponding…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-02-04 Andrii Ilienko

We initiate the study of the Careless Coupon Collector's Problem (CCCP), a novel variation of the classical coupon collector, that we envision as a model for information systems such as web crawlers, dynamic caches, and fault-resilient…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Emilio Cruciani , Aditi Dudeja

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Ben O'Neill

A coupling of two distributions $P_{X}$ and $P_{Y}$ is a joint distribution $P_{XY}$ with marginal distributions equal to $P_{X}$ and $P_{Y}$. Given marginals $P_{X}$ and $P_{Y}$ and a real-valued function $f$ of the joint distribution…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Lei Yu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

This study focuses on statistical inference for compound models of the form $X=\xi_1+\ldots+\xi_N$, where $N$ is a random variable denoting the count of summands, which are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Denis Belomestny , Ekaterina Morozova , Vladimir Panov

The paper provides a simpler method for proving a delicate inequality that was used by Achlioptis and Naor to establish asymptotic concentration for chromatic numbers of Erdos-Renyi random graphs. The simplifications come from two new…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2011-07-20 John Hartigan , David Pollard , Sekhar Tatikonda

We extend the Coupon Collector's Problem (CCP) and present a novel generalized model, referred as the k-LCCP problem, where one is interested in recovering a bipartite graph with a perfect matching, which represents the coupons and their…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Shoham Shimon Berrebi , Eitan Yaakobi , Zohar Yakhini , Daniella Bar-Lev