Statistics: combinations in Python

Question

I need to compute combinatorials (nCr) in Python but cannot find the function to do that in math, numpy or stat libraries. Something

Answer 1

The direct formula produces big integers when n is bigger than 20.

So, yet another response:

from math import factorial

reduce(long.__mul__, range(n-r+1, n+1), 1L) // factorial(r)

short, accurate and efficient because this avoids python big integers by sticking with longs.

It is more accurate and faster when comparing to scipy.special.comb:

 >>> from scipy.special import comb
 >>> nCr = lambda n,r: reduce(long.__mul__, range(n-r+1, n+1), 1L) // factorial(r)
 >>> comb(128,20)
 1.1965669823265365e+23
 >>> nCr(128,20)
 119656698232656998274400L  # accurate, no loss
 >>> from timeit import timeit
 >>> timeit(lambda: comb(n,r))
 8.231969118118286
 >>> timeit(lambda: nCr(128, 20))
 3.885951042175293