Fast arbitrary distribution random sampling (inverse transform sampling)

Question

The random module (http://docs.python.org/2/library/random.html) has several fixed functions to randomly sample from. For example random.gauss

Answer 1

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.