On estimating the alphabet size of a discrete random source

11/20/2017

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by   Philip Ginzboorg, et al.

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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(√(N)) time and space by the memory-restricted variant of this algorithm.