Phrase guide

Chinese restaurant process

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

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1

noun

Meaning 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.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Topics: mathematics, probability-theory, sciences

No example sentence was provided for this meaning.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

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).