Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: st: random uniform variable with unequal probabilities
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: random uniform variable with unequal probabilities
Date
Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:36:55 +0000
On the last point: The crunch is that -rdiscrete()- requires a column
vector of probabilities. The implication, which I didn't spell out, is
that you would need an extra loop to get what is being asked for.
Nick
On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Seed, Paul <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Tomáš Houška <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I need to generate a random variable from uniform distribution, but
>> the probabilities are not not same for each option. The variable is
>> discrete in interval [10,19] and is generated 10times. Each time one
>> of the options has twice as high probability of occurring as the
>> others. So in some sense, the draw is two-staged - in the first stage
>> a random number (n) between 1 and 10 is generated and then that
>> particular n-th option in the interval [10,19] has a probability 0.2
>> of occurring, the other options have a probability 0.8/9 each.
>>
>> How can I generate such variable?
>
> Actually, this _is_ a uniform distribution: It can be shown that
> Pr(X=x) = 0.1 for all integer x in the interval [10,19], = 0 otherwise.
> So the double negative ("not not same") does for once equal a positive.
>
> However, the second sentence implies that what is produced is not a
> number, but a group of 10 numbers, and the 10^10 possible groups are
> definitely not all equally likely. I expect that Nick's code can be
> easily adapted to give blocks of 10 numbers.
>
> BW
>
> Paul T Seed, Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics,
> Division of Women's Health, King's College London
> Women's Health Academic Centre, King's Health Partners
> (+44) (0) 20 7188 3642.
>
>
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/