Monday, October 09, 2006

Coupon collecting.


n coupon types. Get a random one each round. How long to get all coupons?

general example of waiting for combinations of events to happen.

expected case analysis:

after get k coupons, each sample has 1 − k/n chance for new coupon

so wait for (k + 1)st coupon has geometric distribution.

expected value of geo dist w/param p is 1/p

so get harmonic sum

what standard tools did we use? using conditional expectation to study on phase; used linearity of expectation to add

expected time for all coupons: n ln n + O(n).

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