MATLAB: Birthday problem with 3+ people

birthdayMATLABMATLAB and Simulink Student Suite

I would like to use Matlab to figure out the probability that at least 3 people have the same birthday in a sample size of 50 people, but am having trouble figuring out how to do the counting. A series of loops perhaps?

Best Answer

Here are some ideas that you might use

To generate random birthdays for groups of 50 people - look at randi, ignoring leap years birthdays are numbers between 1 and 365

For each random sample group of 50 people you can use histcounts with 365 bins to count how many people have each birthday

with result of histcounts, you can determine if the sample has three or more people with the same birthday by taking the max and seeing if it is greater than or equal 3

do this N times and then estimate the probability as the number of times that you have 3 or more people with same birthday divided by N

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MATLAB: Produce a Date vector starting with a desired date

This seems to work:

date1 = datenum('192607','yyyymm');
date2 = datenum('201412','yyyymm');
datev = date1:(365.25/13):date2;
result = unique(datestr(datev, 'yyyymm'),'rows');
sample = result(1:24,:)                      % Sample Output

MATLAB: Day_diff calculate the difference in days between two peoples birthdays in 2015

"... Make sure to check that the input values are of the correct types and they represent valid dates ..."

Based on the wording of the assignment, I would assume you are to disallow month and day numbers that do not match an actual calendar date. Since 2015 is not a leap year, there is no Feb 29. You need to add code up front to check to see that the month numbers are integers between 1 and 12, and the day numbers are integers between 1 and the number of days in the particular month involved. You also need to ask yourself what happens if the first month is greater than the second month, and if your code correctly handles that situation. I.e., what does month(month1:month2) yield when month1 > month2?

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MATLAB: Produce a Date vector starting with a desired date

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