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Fast computation of multinomial coefficients

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Abstract

In a previous publication, we have used the discrete Fourier transform to compute the binomial coefficients. In the present paper, we extend the previously proposed method to compute the multinomial coefficients, analyse its precision and performance. The other methods, analysed in our previous publication, are also extended to the multinomial case. The FFT method presents the best performance to compute all multinomial coefficients at a given level.

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Notes

  1. The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), created by Neil Sloane, is an online database of integer sequences. It is found at https://oeis.org/.

  2. The type of a sequence is its empirical histogram, which adds up to the number of occurrence of each symbol in a sequence. The type of a sequence of length n is defined by the m-tuple \(\left (\frac {k_{1}}{n},\ldots ,\frac {k_{m}}{n}\right )\), which describes the number of occurrences kj of each j th symbol in an alphabet of size m.

  3. Octave documentation states that “by default numeric constants are represented within Octave by IEEE 754 double precision (binary64) floating-point format” [5] which uses 1 bit for sign, 11 to represent the exponent and 52 to the significant (53 bit precision) [1, 20].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei, Campus Alto Paraopeba, Rod.: MG 443, KM 7, Ouro Branco, MG, 36420-000, Brazil

    Leonardo C. Araujo, João P. H. Sansão & Adriano S. Vale-Cardoso

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  1. Leonardo C. Araujo
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  2. João P. H. Sansão
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  3. Adriano S. Vale-Cardoso
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Correspondence to Leonardo C. Araujo.

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Araujo, L.C., Sansão, J.P.H. & Vale-Cardoso, A.S. Fast computation of multinomial coefficients. Numer Algor 88, 837–851 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11075-020-01059-5

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