Exact sampling and counting for fixed-margin matrices

By Jeffrey W. Miller, Matthew T. Harrison. 2013

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The uniform distribution on matrices with specified row and column sums is often a natural choice of null model when testing for structure in two-way tables (binary or nonnegative integer). Due to the difficulty of sampling from this distribution, many approximate methods have been developed. We will show that by exploiting certain symmetries, exact sampling and counting is in fact possible in many nontrivial real-world cases. We illustrate with real datasets including ecological co-occurrence matrices and contingency tables.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23f39e6cca55fef4eaa6b5e5b92c5c033319c9cd