Consider the problem of multinomial estimation. You are given an alphabet of
k distinct symbols and are told that the i-th symbol occurred exactly n_i times
in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the
conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we
present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and
demonstrate that our solution outperforms standard approaches, both in theory
and in practice.Comment: 23 page