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Multinomial selection in Java Maven Central

Suppose you're picking 100 random balls from a bag. The probabilities of picking Red, Blue, Green are 0.95, 0.03, 0.02. What's the most probable combination? What are k most probable combinations? What if we had to pull from yet another bag of cubes of different colors - then what are possible combinations of balls and cubes that we can pull? This is a problem of Multinomial Selection and it shows up in different contexts. E.g. in Mass Spectrometry, given a Molecular Formula $C_{20}H_{28}Cl_4N_2O_4$, we need to know the most probable isotope combination.

How to use

This library is a generic implementation that doesn't depend on a particular application. The application-specific libraries can wrap this one (like isotope-distribution). Here's how to iterate over all possible combinations starting with the most probable:

// Alphabets represent an Element (a single Bag of balls) - they
// have Symbols (Red, Blue, Green balls) with different probabilities.
//
// In Chemistry terminology an Alphabet is an Element, while Symbol
// is a particular isotope (well, its probability): 
Alphabet c = new Alphabet("C", .99, .1);
Alphabet cl = new Alphabet("Cl", .75, .25);
// Once we have our "Bags", we want to tell how many Symbols (Balls)
// of each Alphabet (Bag) we want to pull (which the map represents):  
Map<Alphabet, Integer> wordSpec = new HashMap<>();
wordSpec.put(c, 15);
wordSpec.put(cl, 5);
// We have all the data, it's time to iterate over all possibilities,
// starting with the most probable:
Iterator<Word> it = WordIteratorFactory.create(new WordSpec(wordSpec));
while(it.hasNext()) {
    Word next = it.next();
    System.out.println(next.probability + ": " + next.symbols);
}

Maven coordinates

Use Maven to download the library (latest version: Maven Central):

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.elsci.multinomial-selection</groupId>
    <artifactId>multinomial-selection</artifactId>
    <version>LATEST VERSION</version>
</dependency>

Implementation notes

In mathematical terms all possible combinations and their probabilities can be generated using a multinomial:

$$ \text{Distribution of probabilities}=(a_{1}+a_{2}+...+a_{n})^A (b_{1}+b_{2}+...+b_{n})^B $$

where

  • $a1$, $a2$ are probabilities of 1st and 2nd elements of the first set (say.. probability of blue and red ball) and $b_1$, $b_2$ are probabilities of the elements of the 2nd set (say.. probabilities of blue and red cubes)
  • $A$ and $B$ is the number of repeats of these elements (taking 2 balls and 3 cubes).

Algorithm and its complexity

The implementation resembles (a little) the one described in Fast Exact Computation of the k Most Abundant Isotope Peaks with Layer-Ordered Heaps. Most likely we're somewhat slower.

The algorithm complexity is hard to calculate exactly, but the overall picture is linearithmic when $k$ is relatively small (which is our main use case). More precisely (and sorry for abusing $O$ here):

$$ O(k^2 \times a^2 \times s^2 \times (log(k \times s) + s)) $$

where each of the params are usually relatively small:

  • $k$ is number of words we select
  • $a$ is the number of alphabets
  • $s$ is the number of symbols in an alphabet (for simplicity sake let's say that each alphabet is of the same size)