Site icon R-bloggers

sampling w/o replacement except when replacing

[This article was first published on R – Xi'an's Og, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Another Riddle(r), considering a box with M myrtle balls and D dandelion balls. Drawing balls without replacement while they stay of the same color as the initial draw, else put back the last ball and repeat the process until all balls are drawn. The funny thing is that, unless M=0 or D=0, the probability to draw a myrtle ball at the end is always ½..! This can be easily checked by simulation (when M=2 and D=8)

r=function()sample(0:1,1,p=c(d,m))
for(t in 1:1e6){
  m=2;d=8
  i=r();m=m-!!i;d=d-!i
  while(!!m*d){
    j=r();i=ifelse(i==j,j,r())
    m=m-!!i;d=d-!i}
  F=F+(m>0)}
F/1e6

Now the proof that the probability is ½ is quite straightforward, for M=1 (or D=1). But I cannot find a quick fix for larger values. I thus reasoned by recursion, with the probability of emptying a given colour first is d!m!/(d+m)!, whatever the colour and whatever d>0,m>0. Hence half a chance to finish with myrtle. Any shorter sequence of a given colour reduces the value of either d or m, at which point we are using the recursion assumption that the probability is ½…

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Xi'an's Og.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.