Generate random numbers with a given (numerical) distribution

Question

I have a file with some probabilities for different values e.g.:

1 0.1
2 0.05
3 0.05
4 0.2
5 0.4
6 0.2

I would like to generate random numb

Answer 1

scipy.stats.rv_discrete might be what you want. You can supply your probabilities via the values parameter. You can then use the rvs() method of the distribution object to generate random numbers.

As pointed out by Eugene Pakhomov in the comments, you can also pass a p keyword parameter to numpy.random.choice(), e.g.

numpy.random.choice(numpy.arange(1, 7), p=[0.1, 0.05, 0.05, 0.2, 0.4, 0.2])

If you are using Python 3.6 or above, you can use random.choices() from the standard library – see the answer by Mark Dickinson.