Distributions of Runs Revisited

Abstract

Distributions of runs have important applications in many fields, including biological sequence analysis. The generating function (GF) method provides a unified approach to tackle different run-related problems in multistate trials. By utilizing this method, various run-related distributions are derived in a systematic way for both conditional and unconditional models. The GF approach also naturally yields the asymptotic distributions. For all the distributions considered, the limiting distributions are Gaussian, with mean, variance, and covariance linear functions in the size of the system.