Pythonic way to select list elements with different probability [duplicate]

Answer 1

Here's a class to expose a bunch of items with relative probabilities, without actually expanding the list:

import bisect
class WeightedTuple(object):
    """
    >>> p = WeightedTuple({'A': 2, 'B': 1, 'C': 3})
    >>> len(p)
    6
    >>> p[0], p[1], p[2], p[3], p[4], p[5]
    ('A', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'C', 'C')
    >>> p[-1], p[-2], p[-3], p[-4], p[-5], p[-6]
    ('C', 'C', 'C', 'B', 'A', 'A')
    >>> p[6]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
    IndexError
    >>> p[-7]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
    IndexError
    """
    def __init__(self, items):
        self.indexes = []
        self.items = []
        next_index = 0
        for key in sorted(items.keys()):
            val = items[key]
            self.indexes.append(next_index)
            self.items.append(key)
            next_index += val

        self.len = next_index

    def __getitem__(self, n):
        if n < 0:
            n = self.len + n
        if n < 0 or n >= self.len:
            raise IndexError

        idx = bisect.bisect_right(self.indexes, n)
        return self.items[idx-1]

    def __len__(self):
        return self.len

Now, just say:

data = WeightedTuple({'A': 30, 'B': 40, 'C': 30})
random.choice(data)