1995/08/30 by Ristad, Eric Sven
#Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cmp-lg/9508012
Consider the problem of multinomial estimation. You are given an alphabet of k distinct symbols and are told that the i-th symbol occurred exactly ni times in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and demonstrate that our solution outperforms standard approaches, both in theory and in practice.