English Explanatory Dictionary

Chinese restaurant process

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A discrete-time stochastic process, analogous to seating customers at tables in a restaurant, such that, at time n, the n customers have been partitioned among m ≤ n tables (or blocks of a partition). It has applications in population genetics, linguistic analysis, and image recognition.

Word forms

Chinese restaurant process Chinese restaurant processes

Etymology

The restaurant analogy first appeared in a 1985 write-up by David Aldous, where it was attributed to Jim Pitman (who additionally credits Lester Dubins).

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