General Formulas for the Central and Non-Central Moments of the Multinomial Distribution
Department of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Stats 2021, 4(1), 18-27; https://doi.org/10.3390/stats4010002
Received: 10 November 2020
/
Revised: 31 December 2020
/
Accepted: 5 January 2021
/
Published: 6 January 2021
(This article belongs to the Section Multivariate Analysis)
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.