Problem regarding coloring balls drawn from a bin

balls-in-binscoupon-collectorexpected valueprobabilityrecreational-mathematics

I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but here I have the following problem:

There are $n$ indistinguishable red balls in a bin. Each "round," $k$ balls are randomly chosen from the bin with equal probability. All $k$ balls are colored blue and put back into the bin (this means that balls that are already blue are not changed). What is the expected number of rounds needed to color all $n$ balls blue?

Is there an explicit formula for this problem? I've thought about this problem for a bit and quickly got stumped, but I realized that unless there was some insight for the problem, a recursive formula of some sort is probably needed as each round relies on the results of the previous rounds. If the formula turns out to be recursive, is there some relatively "simple" heuristic that can estimate the expected number of rounds?

There's also the tricky case of infinitely drawing blue balls after initially drawing some red balls, which would result in an infinite number of rounds. But my gut feeling says that the probability of this happening are small enough that the expected number of rounds should be finite.

After searching a bit online, this seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong) the Coupon collector's problem but multiple coupons are drawn at once instead of just one at a time, and that each of the coupons drawn are all distinct. If that's the case, can any of the insights from that problem be used in the problem I have currently?

Best Answer

You already have an excellent solution, but here is a solution by a different method that renders the result in a different form.

Define $T$ to be the number of the first draw on which all red balls have been seen; we want to find $E(T)$. We will use the theorem that $$E(T) = \sum_{m=0}^{\infty} P(T > m)$$ Now $T>m$ if and only if at least one ball has never been seen in draws one through $m$; by inclusion/exclusion, this probability is $$P(T > m) = \sum_{j=1}^n (-1)^{j+1} \binom{n}{j} \frac{\binom{n-j}{k}^m}{\binom{n}{k}^m}$$ So $$E(T) = \sum_{m=0}^{\infty} P(T > m) = \sum_{m=0}^{\infty}\sum_{j=1}^n (-1)^{j+1} \binom{n}{j} \frac{\binom{n-j}{k}^m}{\binom{n}{k}^m}$$ Switching the order of summation, $$\begin{align} E(T) &= \sum_{j=1}^n \sum_{m=0}^{\infty} (-1)^{j+1} \binom{n}{j} \frac{\binom{n-j}{k}^m}{\binom{n}{k}^m} \\ &= \sum_{j=1}^n (-1)^{j+1} \binom{n}{j} \sum_{m=0}^{\infty} \frac{\binom{n-j}{k}^m}{\binom{n}{k}^m} \\ &= \sum_{j=1}^n (-1)^{j+1} \binom{n}{j} \frac{1}{1-\binom{n-j}{k}/\binom{n}{k}} \end{align}$$ In the last step we summed a geometric series.

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