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Related papers: The clumsy coupon collector's problem

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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…

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

Motivated by a problem in the theory of randomized search heuristics, we give a very precise analysis for the coupon collector problem where the collector starts with a random set of coupons (chosen uniformly from all sets). We show that…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Benjamin Doerr , Carola Doerr

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Daniel Berend , Tomer Sher

We study three nonmonotone coupon-collector models through a stationary-entry viewpoint. In such models the all-present state is not absorbing, so completion is governed not by the disappearance of a monotone terminal cloud but by rare new…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Christopher D. Long

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

In this paper the coupon collector's problem with group drawings is studied. Assume there are $ n $ different coupons. At each time precisely $ s $ of the $ n $ coupons are drawn, where all choices are supposed to have equal probability.…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Carina Betken , Christoph Thäle

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

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

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

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 prove that, in the coupon collector's problem, the point processes given by the times of $r$-th arrivals for coupons of each type, centered and normalized in a proper way, converge toward a non-homogeneous Poisson point process. This…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-09-16 Andrii Ilienko

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

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

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

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

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

In the coupon collector problem with $n$ items, the collector needs a random number of tries $T_n\simeq n\ln n$ to complete the collection. Also, after $nt$ tries, the collector has secured approximately a fraction…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-06-27 Anis Amri , Philippe Chassaing

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-01-20 Marcel Wild , Svante Janson , Stephan Wagner , Dirk Laurie

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