I want to specify the probability density function of a distribution and then pick up N random numbers from that distribution in Python. How do I go about doing that?
In general, you want to have the inverse cumulative probability density function. Once you have that, then generating the random numbers along the distribution is simple:
import random
def sample(n):
return [ icdf(random.random()) for _ in range(n) ]
Or, if you use NumPy:
import numpy as np
def sample(n):
return icdf(np.random.random(n))
In both cases icdf is the inverse cumulative distribution function which accepts a value between 0 and 1 and outputs the corresponding value from the distribution.
To illustrate the nature of icdf, we'll take a simple uniform distribution between values 10 and 12 as an example:
probability distribution function is 0.5 between 10 and 12, zero elsewhere
cumulative distribution function is 0 below 10 (no samples below 10), 1 above 12 (no samples above 12) and increases linearly between the values (integral of the PDF)
inverse cumulative distribution function is only defined between 0 and 1. At 0 it is 10, at 12 it is 1, and changes linearly between the values
Of course, the difficult part is obtaining the inverse cumulative density function. It really depends on your distribution, sometimes you may have an analytical function, sometimes you may want to resort to interpolation. Numerical methods may be useful, as numerical integration can be used to create the CDF and interpolation can be used to invert it.
This is my function to retrieve a single random number distributed according to the given probability density function. I used a Monte-Carlo like approach. Of course n random numbers can be generated by calling this function n times.
"""
Draws a random number from given probability density function.
Parameters
----------
pdf -- the function pointer to a probability density function of form P = pdf(x)
interval -- the resulting random number is restricted to this interval
pdfmax -- the maximum of the probability density function
integers -- boolean, indicating if the result is desired as integer
max_iterations -- maximum number of 'tries' to find a combination of random numbers (rand_x, rand_y) located below the function value calc_y = pdf(rand_x).
returns a single random number according the pdf distribution.
"""
def draw_random_number_from_pdf(pdf, interval, pdfmax = 1, integers = False, max_iterations = 10000):
for i in range(max_iterations):
if integers == True:
rand_x = np.random.randint(interval[0], interval[1])
else:
rand_x = (interval[1] - interval[0]) * np.random.random(1) + interval[0] #(b - a) * random_sample() + a
rand_y = pdfmax * np.random.random(1)
calc_y = pdf(rand_x)
if(rand_y <= calc_y ):
return rand_x
raise Exception("Could not find a matching random number within pdf in " + max_iterations + " iterations.")
In my opinion this solution is performing better than other solutions if you do not have to retrieve a very large number of random variables. Another benefit is that you only need the PDF and avoid calculating the CDF, inverse CDF or weights.
Related
I would like to simulate something on the subject of photon-photon-interaction. In particular, there is Halpern scattering. Here is the German Wikipedia entry on it Halpern-Streuung. And there the differential cross section has an angular dependence of (3+(cos(theta))^2)^2.
I would like to have a generator of random numbers between 0 and 2*Pi, which corresponds to the density function ((3+(cos(theta))^2)^2)*(1/(99*Pi/4)). So the values around 0, Pi and 2*Pi should occur a little more often than the values around Pi/2 and 3.
I have already found that there is a function on how to randomly output discrete values with user-defined probability values numpy.random.choice(numpy.arange(1, 7), p=[0.1, 0.05, 0.05, 0.2, 0.4, 0.2]). I could work with that in an emergency, should there be nothing else. But actually I already want a continuous probability distribution here.
I know that even if there is such a Python command where you can enter a mathematical distribution function, it basically only produces discrete distributions of values, since no irrational numbers with 1s and 0s can be represented. But still, such a command would be more elegant with a continuous function.
Assuming the density function you have is proportional to a probability density function (PDF) you can use the rejection sampling method: Draw a number in a box until the box falls within the density function. It works for any bounded density function with a closed and bounded domain, as long as you know what the domain and bound are (the bound is the maximum value of f in the domain). In this case, the bound is 64/(99*math.pi) and the algorithm works as follows:
import math
import random
def sample():
mn=0 # Lowest value of domain
mx=2*math.pi # Highest value of domain
bound=64/(99*math.pi) # Upper bound of PDF value
while True: # Do the following until a value is returned
# Choose an X inside the desired sampling domain.
x=random.uniform(mn,mx)
# Choose a Y between 0 and the maximum PDF value.
y=random.uniform(0,bound)
# Calculate PDF
pdf=(((3+(math.cos(x))**2)**2)*(1/(99*math.pi/4)))
# Does (x,y) fall in the PDF?
if y<pdf:
# Yes, so return x
return x
# No, so loop
See also the section "Sampling from an Arbitrary Distribution" in my article on randomization.
The following shows the method's correctness by showing the probability that the returned sample is less than π/8. For correctness, the probability should be close to 0.0788:
print(sum(1 if sample()<math.pi/8 else 0 for _ in range(1000000))/1000000)
I had two suggestions in mind. The inverse transform sampling method and the "Deletion metode" (I'll just call it that). The inverse transform sampling method: There is an inverse function to my distribution. But I get problems in several places with the math. functions because of the domain. E.g. math.sqrt(-1). You would still have to trick around with if-queries here.That's why I decided to use Peter's suggestion.
And if you collect values in a loop and plot them in a histogram, it also looks quite good. Here with 40000 values and 100 bins
Here is the whole code for someone who is interested
import numpy as np
import math
import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
N=40000
bins=100
def Deletion_method():
x=None
while x==None:
mn=0 # Lowest value of domain
mx=2*math.pi # Highest value of domain
bound=64/(99*math.pi) # Upper bound of PDF value
# Choose an X inside the desired sampling domain.
xrad=random.uniform(mn,mx)
# Choose a Y between 0 and the maximum PDF value.
y=random.uniform(0,bound)
# Calculate PDF
P=((3+(math.cos(xrad))**2)**2)*(1/(99*math.pi/4))
# Does (x,y) fall in the PDF?
if y<P:
x=xrad
return(x)
Values=[]
for k in range(0, N):
Values=np.append(Values, [Deletion_method()])
plt.hist(Values, bins)
plt.show()
I am want to sample from the binomial distribution B(n,p) but with an additional constraint that the sampled value belongs in the range [a,b] (instead of the normal 0 to n range). In other words, I have to sample a value from binomial distribution given that it lies in the range [a,b]. Mathematically, I can write the pmf of this distribution (f(x)) in terms of the pmf of binomial distribution bin(x) = [(nCx)*(p)^x*(1-p)^(n-x)] as
sum = 0
for i in range(a,b+1):
sum += bin(i)
f(x) = bin(x)/sum
One way of sampling from this distribution is to sample a uniformly distributed number and apply the inverse of the CDF(obtained using the pmf). However, I don't think this is a good idea as the pmf calculation would easily get very time-consuming.
The values of n,x,a,b are quite large in my case and this way of computing pmf and then using a uniform random variable to generate the sample seems extremely inefficient due to the factorial terms in nCx.
What's a nice/efficient way to achieve this?
This is a way to collect all the values of bin in a pretty short time:
from scipy.special import comb
import numpy as np
def distribution(n, p=0.5):
x = np.arange(n+1)
return comb(n, x, exact=False) * p ** x * (1 - p) ** (n - x)
It can be done in a quarter of microsecond for n=1000.
Sample run:
>>> distribution(4):
array([0.0625, 0.25 , 0.375 , 0.25 , 0.0625])
You can sum specific parts of this array like so:
>>> np.sum(distribution(4)[2:4])
0.625
Remark: For n>1000 middle values of this distribution requires to use extremely large numbers in multiplication therefore RuntimeWarning is raised.
Bugfix
You can use scipy.stats.binom equivalently:
from scipy.stats import binom
def distribution(n, p):
return binom.pmf(np.arange(n+1), n, p)
This does the same as above mentioned method quite efficiently (n=1000000 in a third of second). Alternatively, you can use binom.cdf(np.arange(n+1), n, p) which calculate cumulative sum of binom.pmf. Then subtraction of bth and ath items of this array gives an output which is very close to what you expect.
Another way would be to use the CDF and it's inverse, something like:
from scipy import stats
dist = stats.binom(100, 0.5)
# limit ourselves to [60, 100]
lo, hi = dist.cdf([60, 100])
# draw a sample
x = dist.ppf(stats.uniform(lo, hi-lo).rvs())
should give us values in the range. note that due to floating point precision, this might give you values outside of what you want. it gets worse above the mean of the distribution
note that for large values you might as well use the normal approximation
I need to compute the mutual information, and so the shannon entropy of N variables.
I wrote a code that compute shannon entropy of certain distribution.
Let's say that I have a variable x, array of numbers.
Following the definition of shannon entropy I need to compute the probability density function normalized, so using the numpy.histogram is easy to get it.
import scipy.integrate as scint
from numpy import*
from scipy import*
def shannon_entropy(a, bins):
p,binedg= histogram(a,bins,normed=True)
p=p/len(p)
x=binedg[:-1]
g=-p*log2(p)
g[isnan(g)]=0.
return scint.simps(g,x=x)
Choosing inserting x, and carefully the bin number this function works.
But this function is very dependent on the bin number: choosing different values of this parameter I got different values.
Particularly if my input is an array of values constant:
x=[0,0,0,....,0,0,0]
the entropy of this variables obviously has to be 0, but if I choose the bin number equal to 1 I got the right answer, if I choose different values I got strange non sense (negative) answers.. what I am feeling is that numpy.histogram have the arguments normed=True or density= True that (as said in the official documentation) they should give back the histogram normalized, and probably I do some error in the moment that I swich from the probability density function (output of numpy.histogram) to the probability mass function (input of shannon entropy), I do:
p,binedg= histogram(a,bins,normed=True)
p=p/len(p)
I would like to find a way to solve these problems, I would like to have an efficient method to compute the shannon entropy independent of the bin number.
I wrote a function to compute the shannon entropy of a distribution of more variables, but I got the same error.
The code is this, where the input of the function shannon_entropydd is the array where at each position there is each variable that has to be involved in the statistical computation
def intNd(c,axes):
assert len(c.shape) == len(axes)
assert all([c.shape[i] == axes[i].shape[0] for i in range(len(axes))])
if len(axes) == 1:
return scint.simps(c,axes[0])
else:
return intNd(scint.simps(c,axes[-1]),axes[:-1])
def shannon_entropydd(c,bins=30):
hist,ax=histogramdd(c,bins,normed=True)
for i in range(len(ax)):
ax[i]=ax[i][:-1]
p=-hist*log2(hist)
p[isnan(p)]=0
return intNd(p,ax)
I need these quantities in order to be able to compute the mutual information between certain set of variables:
M_info(x,y,z)= H(x)+H(z)+H(y)- H(x,y,z)
where H(x) is the shannon entropy of the variable x
I have to find a way to compute these quantities so if some one has a completely different kind of code that works I can switch on it, I don't need to repair this code but find a right way to compute this statistical functions!
The result will depend pretty strongly on the estimated density. Can you assume a specific form for the density? You can reduce the dependence of the result on the estimate if you avoid histograms or other general-purpose estimates such as kernel density estimates. If you can give more detail about the variables involved, I can make more specific comments.
I worked with estimates of mutual information as part of the work for my dissertation [1]. There is some stuff about MI in section 8.1 and appendix F.
[1] http://riso.sourceforge.net/docs/dodier-dissertation.pdf
I think that if you choose bins = 1, you will always find an entropy of 0, as there is no "uncertainty" over the possible bin the values are in ("uncertainty" is what entropy measures). You should choose an number of bins "big enough" to account for the diversity of the values that your variable can take. If you have discrete values: for binary values, you should take such that bins >= 2. If the values that can take your variable are in {0,1,2}, you should have bins >= 3, and so on...
I must say that I did not read your code, but this works for me:
import numpy as np
x = [0,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,0,1,1]
bins = 10
cx = np.histogram(x, bins)[0]
def entropy(c):
c_normalized = c/float(np.sum(c))
c_normalized = c_normalized[np.nonzero(c_normalized)]
h = -sum(c_normalized * np.log(c_normalized))
return h
hx = entropy(cx)
The random module (http://docs.python.org/2/library/random.html) has several fixed functions to randomly sample from. For example random.gauss will sample random point from a normal distribution with a given mean and sigma values.
I'm looking for a way to extract a number N of random samples between a given interval using my own distribution as fast as possible in python. This is what I mean:
def my_dist(x):
# Some distribution, assume c1,c2,c3 and c4 are known.
f = c1*exp(-((x-c2)**c3)/c4)
return f
# Draw N random samples from my distribution between given limits a,b.
N = 1000
N_rand_samples = ran_func_sample(my_dist, a, b, N)
where ran_func_sample is what I'm after and a, b are the limits from which to draw the samples. Is there anything of that sort in python?
You need to use Inverse transform sampling method to get random values distributed according to a law you want. Using this method you can just apply inverted function
to random numbers having standard uniform distribution in the interval [0,1].
After you find the inverted function, you get 1000 numbers distributed according to the needed distribution this obvious way:
[inverted_function(random.random()) for x in range(1000)]
More on Inverse Transform Sampling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling
Also, there is a good question on StackOverflow related to the topic:
Pythonic way to select list elements with different probability
This code implements the sampling of n-d discrete probability distributions. By setting a flag on the object, it can also be made to be used as a piecewise constant probability distribution, which can then be used to approximate arbitrary pdf's. Well, arbitrary pdfs with compact support; if you efficiently want to sample extremely long tails, a non-uniform description of the pdf would be required. But this is still efficient even for things like airy-point-spread functions (which I created it for, initially). The internal sorting of values is absolutely critical there to get accuracy; the many small values in the tails should contribute substantially, but they will get drowned out in fp accuracy without sorting.
class Distribution(object):
"""
draws samples from a one dimensional probability distribution,
by means of inversion of a discrete inverstion of a cumulative density function
the pdf can be sorted first to prevent numerical error in the cumulative sum
this is set as default; for big density functions with high contrast,
it is absolutely necessary, and for small density functions,
the overhead is minimal
a call to this distibution object returns indices into density array
"""
def __init__(self, pdf, sort = True, interpolation = True, transform = lambda x: x):
self.shape = pdf.shape
self.pdf = pdf.ravel()
self.sort = sort
self.interpolation = interpolation
self.transform = transform
#a pdf can not be negative
assert(np.all(pdf>=0))
#sort the pdf by magnitude
if self.sort:
self.sortindex = np.argsort(self.pdf, axis=None)
self.pdf = self.pdf[self.sortindex]
#construct the cumulative distribution function
self.cdf = np.cumsum(self.pdf)
#property
def ndim(self):
return len(self.shape)
#property
def sum(self):
"""cached sum of all pdf values; the pdf need not sum to one, and is imlpicitly normalized"""
return self.cdf[-1]
def __call__(self, N):
"""draw """
#pick numbers which are uniformly random over the cumulative distribution function
choice = np.random.uniform(high = self.sum, size = N)
#find the indices corresponding to this point on the CDF
index = np.searchsorted(self.cdf, choice)
#if necessary, map the indices back to their original ordering
if self.sort:
index = self.sortindex[index]
#map back to multi-dimensional indexing
index = np.unravel_index(index, self.shape)
index = np.vstack(index)
#is this a discrete or piecewise continuous distribution?
if self.interpolation:
index = index + np.random.uniform(size=index.shape)
return self.transform(index)
if __name__=='__main__':
shape = 3,3
pdf = np.ones(shape)
pdf[1]=0
dist = Distribution(pdf, transform=lambda i:i-1.5)
print dist(10)
import matplotlib.pyplot as pp
pp.scatter(*dist(1000))
pp.show()
And as a more real-world relevant example:
x = np.linspace(-100, 100, 512)
p = np.exp(-x**2)
pdf = p[:,None]*p[None,:] #2d gaussian
dist = Distribution(pdf, transform=lambda i:i-256)
print dist(1000000).mean(axis=1) #should be in the 1/sqrt(1e6) range
import matplotlib.pyplot as pp
pp.scatter(*dist(1000))
pp.show()
Here is a rather nice way of performing inverse transform sampling with a decorator.
import numpy as np
from scipy.interpolate import interp1d
def inverse_sample_decorator(dist):
def wrapper(pnts, x_min=-100, x_max=100, n=1e5, **kwargs):
x = np.linspace(x_min, x_max, int(n))
cumulative = np.cumsum(dist(x, **kwargs))
cumulative -= cumulative.min()
f = interp1d(cumulative/cumulative.max(), x)
return f(np.random.random(pnts))
return wrapper
Using this decorator on a Gaussian distribution, for example:
#inverse_sample_decorator
def gauss(x, amp=1.0, mean=0.0, std=0.2):
return amp*np.exp(-(x-mean)**2/std**2/2.0)
You can then generate sample points from the distribution by calling the function. The keyword arguments x_min and x_max are the limits of the original distribution and can be passed as arguments to gauss along with the other key word arguments that parameterise the distribution.
samples = gauss(5000, mean=20, std=0.8, x_min=19, x_max=21)
Alternatively, this can be done as a function that takes the distribution as an argument (as in your original question),
def inverse_sample_function(dist, pnts, x_min=-100, x_max=100, n=1e5,
**kwargs):
x = np.linspace(x_min, x_max, int(n))
cumulative = np.cumsum(dist(x, **kwargs))
cumulative -= cumulative.min()
f = interp1d(cumulative/cumulative.max(), x)
return f(np.random.random(pnts))
I was in a similar situation but I wanted to sample from a multivariate distribution, so, I implemented a rudimentary version of Metropolis-Hastings (which is an MCMC method).
def metropolis_hastings(target_density, size=500000):
burnin_size = 10000
size += burnin_size
x0 = np.array([[0, 0]])
xt = x0
samples = []
for i in range(size):
xt_candidate = np.array([np.random.multivariate_normal(xt[0], np.eye(2))])
accept_prob = (target_density(xt_candidate))/(target_density(xt))
if np.random.uniform(0, 1) < accept_prob:
xt = xt_candidate
samples.append(xt)
samples = np.array(samples[burnin_size:])
samples = np.reshape(samples, [samples.shape[0], 2])
return samples
This function requires a function target_density which takes in a data-point and computes its probability.
For details check-out this detailed answer of mine.
import numpy as np
import scipy.interpolate as interpolate
def inverse_transform_sampling(data, n_bins, n_samples):
hist, bin_edges = np.histogram(data, bins=n_bins, density=True)
cum_values = np.zeros(bin_edges.shape)
cum_values[1:] = np.cumsum(hist*np.diff(bin_edges))
inv_cdf = interpolate.interp1d(cum_values, bin_edges)
r = np.random.rand(n_samples)
return inv_cdf(r)
So if we give our data sample that has a specific distribution, the inverse_transform_sampling function will return a dataset with exactly the same distribution. Here the advantage is that we can get our own sample size by specifying it in the n_samples variable.
I need to generate a vector of random float numbers between [0,1] such
that their sum equals 1 and that are distributed non-uniformly.
Is there any python function that generates such a vector?
Best wishes
The distribution you are probably looking for is called the Dirichlet distribution. There's no built-in function in Python for drawing random numbers from a Dirichlet distribution, but NumPy contains one:
>>> from numpy.random.mtrand import dirichlet
>>> print dirichlet([1] * n)
This will give you n numbers that sum up to 1, and the probability of each such combination will be equal.
Alternatively, if you don't have NumPy, you can make use of the fact that a random sample drawn from an n-dimensional Dirichlet distribution can be generated by drawing n independent samples from a gamma distribution with shape and scale parameters equal to 1 and then dividing the samples with the sum:
>>> from random import gammavariate
>>> def dirichlet(n):
... samples = [gammavariate(1, 1) for _ in xrange(n)]
... sum_samples = sum(samples)
... return [x/sum_samples for x in samples]
The reason why you need a Dirichlet distribution is because if you simply draw random numbers uniformly from some interval and then divide them by the sum of them, the resulting distribution will be biased towards samples consisting of roughly equal numbers. See Luc Devroye's book for more on this topic.
There is a nicer example in Wikipedia page: Dirichlet distribution.
The code below generate a k dimension sample:
params = [a1, a2, ..., ak]
sample = [random.gammavariate(a,1) for a in params]
sample = [v/sum(sample) for v in sample]