Birthday problem, want about using unordered counting

combinatoricsprobability

Given there are 365 days in a year and $n$ people, the probability that at least two people have the same birthday is given by
$$\frac{365^n – 365 \cdot 364 \cdots (365-n+1)}{365^n}.$$
In this calculation, we treat the $n$ birthdays we selected as a sequence where their order matters.

If we think the $n$ dates that randomly selected as a set where the order does not matter, I believe we would have the probability
$$\frac{{365+n-1 \choose n} – {365\choose n}}{{365+n-1 \choose n}}.$$

  • For the total number of outcomes, we model by throwing $n$ balls uniformly randomly into $365$ boxes. Essentially, there are $n$ balls and $365-1$ walls (between the boxes). For example
    $$ \circ |\;\;\; |\;\;\;|\circ \circ |\;\;\;|\circ |\cdots |$$
    would mean one person was born on day $1$, two people were born on day $4$, one person was born on day $6$, and so on.
    This is how I came up with the ${365+n-1\choose n}$.

  • For the case that everyone has a distinct birthday, it would be ${365 \choose n}$.

What is wrong with this approach?

Best Answer

When you have an event $E$ in a sample space $S$, the formula $P(E)=|E|/|S|$ only works when all the outcomes in $S$ are equally likely. When you forgot about order in the birthday problem, your sample space consisted of all multisets of $n$ birthdays. These are not all equally likely; the probability of two people being born on Jan 1 is $(1/365)^2$, but the probability of two people having the set of birthdays equal to $\{\text{Jan 1 , Jan 2}\}$ is $2(1/365)^2$, since there are two ways it can happen. This is why your formula fails.

The trick of forgetting the order often works in probability, but not here.


Side note: If you were to assert that all multisets of birthdays are equally likely, it would imply that the birthdays of the people are dependent in the following way. You can imagine the birthdays being chosen one at a time, where if there are already $n_i$ people whose birthday is the $i^{th}$ day of the year, the probability the next person is born on day $i$ is $$ \frac{n_i+1}{\sum_{i=1}^{365}(n_i+1)} $$ For example, the first person is equally likely to be born on any day, but then the second person has a $2/366$ chance of being born on the same day as the first person, and a $1/366$ chance of being born on any other day.