Chinese restaurant process

English

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).

Noun

Chinese restaurant process (plural Chinese restaurant processes)

1. (probability theory) 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.