The number of K-tons in the coupon collector problem

  • John C. Saunders

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

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, and that we keep buying boxes until we collect at least m coupons of each type. For call a certain coupon a k-ton if we see it k times by the time we have seen m copies of all of the coupons. Here we determine the asymptotic distribution of the number of k-tons after we have collected m copies of each coupon for any k in a restricted range, given any fixed m. We also determine the asymptotic joint probability distribution over such values of k, and the total number of coupons collected.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)723-736
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Applied Probability
Volume60
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Sep 2023
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Probability distributions
  • combinatorial probability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • General Mathematics
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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