Improved estimates for the number of non-negative integer matrices with given row and column sums

The number of non-negative integer matrices with given row and column sums features in a variety of problems in mathematics and statistics but no closed-form expression for it is known, so we rely on approximations. In this paper, we describe a new such approximation, motivated by consideration of the statistics of matrices with non-integer numbers of columns. This estimate can be evaluated in time linear in the size of the matrix and returns results of accuracy as good as or better than existing linear-time approximations across a wide range of settings. We show that the estimate is asymptotically exact in the regime of sparse tables, while empirically performing at least as well as other linear-time estimates in the regime of dense tables. We also use the new estimate as the starting point for an improved numerical method for either counting or sampling matrices with given margins using sequential importance sampling. Code implementing our methods is available.