Distributing integers using weights? How to calculate?

Question

I need to distribute a value based on some weights. For example, if my weights are 1 and 2, then I would expect the column weighted as 2 to have twice the value as the colum

Answer 1

If you expect distributing 3 with weights of (1,2,3) to be equal to (0.5, 1, 1.5), then the rounding is your problem:

weighted_value = round(p*total)

You want:

weighted_value = p*total

EDIT: Solution to return integer distribution

def distribute(total, distribution):
  leftover = 0.0
  distributed_total = []
  distribution_sum = sum(distribution)
  for weight in distribution:
    weight = float(weight)
    leftover, weighted_value = modf(weight*total/distribution_sum + leftover)
    distributed_total.append(weighted_value)
  distributed_total[-1] = round(distributed_total[-1]+leftover) #mitigate round off errors
  return distributed_total