Coupon collection problem and negative binomial distribution

coupon-collectornegative binomialprobabilityprobability distributions

The problem is: "Given 6 coupons, how many coupons do you expect you need to draw with replacement before having drawn each coupon at least once?"

The solution is well-known:
$$E[X] = E\left[1+\sum_{i=1}^5X_i\right]=1+\sum_{i=1}^5E[X_i]=14.7$$
where $X_i$ is the number of tries between i-th and (i+1)-th new coupon (geometric random variable).

However, the sum of geometric random variables $\sum_{i=1}^5X_i$ can be seen as the negative binomial distribution with parameters $p=1/6$ and $r=5$. But calculating the mean of this distribution according to the known formula for the negative binomial distribution
$$\dfrac{pr}{1-p}=\dfrac{1/6\cdot 5}{1-1/6}=1$$
I obtain the wrong resut. What is wrong in my reasoning?

Best Answer

Here, each random variable $X_i$ has different success probability $(\frac{6-i}{6}$ for $X_i)$.

Therefore, you can't model the sum of $X_i$'s as negative binomial distribution where the success probability remains constant.