Re: A conditional random number generation problem (please help me!)
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg66880] Re: A conditional random number generation problem (please help me!)
- From: "mike" <mike at hus.parkingspa.com>
- Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 04:09:12 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <e1ijuv$3oh$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
"rjmachado3" <rjmachado3 at portugalmail.pt> wrote in message news:e1ijuv$3oh$1 at smc.vnet.net... >I need to know the formula for the random function that return random > numbers in a range of a and b integers [a,b] but that obey on a custom > probability (possibly different!) for each integer number on this [a,b] > range (of course the sum of all integer number probabilities are = 1!). > Finally, what i want is the general function formula that simulate the > random behavior (based on a custom probability value for each integer > number between the [a,b] range. confuse? i hope not! please help me!!!! > > what i know so far is that the function formula for generating a "pure" > random number between [a,b] range is: > > rand()*(b-a)+a > > where rand() return a random number between 0 and 1. > > If I understand your problem correctly it is similar to one I have had to solve. I have a vector with over 15 million integers in the range of -3500 to + 3300. Zero and +1 and -1 occur more often than +/- 2 which are more frequent than +/- 3 etc. However some integers occur much more frequently than the next smaller value and there is no known function defining the frequency of all integers. I need to be able to randomly generate arbitrary numbers of additional integers with the same frequency as found in the original vector. I solved this by simply using the built-in random function to generate an index into the original vector and returned what ever value was found. I hope this helps. Mike Sicilian