General formulas for the central and non-central moments of the multinomial distribution

Abstract

We present the first general formulas for the central and non-central moments of the multinomial distribution, using a combinatorial argument and the factorial moments previously obtained in Mosimann (1962). We use the formulas to give explicit expressions for all the non-central moments up to order 8 and all the central moments up to order 4. These results expand significantly on those in Newcomer (2008) and Newcomer et al. (2008), where the non-central moments were calculated up to order 4.Comment: 9 pages, 0 figure