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arXiv · 1711.07545

On estimating the alphabet size of a discrete random source

Philip Ginzboorg
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Abstract

We are concerned with estimating alphabet size $N$ from a stream of symbols taken uniformly at random from that alphabet. We define and analyze a memory-restricted variant of an algorithm that have been earlier proposed for this purpose. The alphabet size $N$ can be estimated in $O(\sqrt{N})$ time and space by the memory-restricted variant of this algorithm.

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Philip Ginzboorg. 2017-11-20. On estimating the alphabet size of a discrete random source. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07545

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