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Chinese restaurant process

Chinese restaurant process noun: 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.

Noun

Chinese restaurant process (plural Chinese restaurant processes)

  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.

Forms of Chinese restaurant process

pluralChinese restaurant processes

Origin of Chinese restaurant process

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).

Questions about Chinese restaurant process

What does Chinese restaurant process mean?
Chinese restaurant process means 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.
What part of speech is Chinese restaurant process?
Chinese restaurant process is a noun.
What is the plural of Chinese restaurant process?
The plural of Chinese restaurant process is Chinese restaurant processes.

Words near Chinese restaurant process in the dictionary

  1. Chinese radishes
  2. Chinese ragwort
  3. Chinese red
  4. Chinese reds
  5. Chinese remainder theorem
  6. Chinese restaurant process
  7. Chinese restaurant processes
  8. Chinese restaurant syndrome
  9. Chinese river dolphin
  10. Chinese river dolphins
  11. Chinese room

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Chinese restaurant process (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Chinese restaurant process.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chinese_restaurant_process. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.