Uniform random choice of integer

Mark Bell
23 ●2 ●2 ●5

I want to perform some statistical sampling and to do this I need to uniformly randomly choose an integer from [0, N) where $N \approx 10^{50}$ . It appears that there are several plausible ways to do this in Sage:

1) randint(0, N-1)

However, the standard Python random library appears to have some non-uniformity, for example see this ticket.

2) import numpy; numpy.random.randint(0, N)

However, since N is so large, this raises

ValueError: high is out of bounds for int64

3) ZZ.random_element(0, N)

Do either of the issues that methods 1) and 2) suffer from apply to method 3)? That is, is 3) the correct way to integers uniformly at random?

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answered 7 years ago

dan_fulea
5650 ●5 ●44 ●97

Here is an other possibility:

sage: import random
sage: random.getrandbits(167)
96541868459945240442714629364038017535847363449131L
sage: ZZ(_)
96541868459945240442714629364038017535847363449131
sage: len(str(_))
50

(Well, $51$ decimal digits will also occur... I hope this is not an issue in the further application.)

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answered 7 years ago

tmonteil
27483 ●32 ●205 ●519 http://wiki.sagemath.o...

updated 7 years ago

At least, the method is different since ZZ.random_element use random generation from gmp (or its fork mpir), so it should not show the same drawbacks (though i can not guarantee that there is no other issue) . It is moreover much faster than randint.

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answered 7 years ago

Emmanuel Charpentier
7814 ●8 ●53 ●156

Maybe, this :

sage: N=1e50
sage: L=2000
sage: foo=[Integer(t) for t in r.round(r.runif(L,0,N)).sage()]

would have better properties ?

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