How to compute the probability of a value given a list of samples from a distribution in Python?

Question

Not sure if this belongs in statistics, but I am trying to use Python to achieve this. I essentially just have a list of integers:

data = [300,244,543,1011,3         


        

Answer 1

Here is one possible solution. You count the number of occurrences of each value in the original list. The future probability for a given value is its past rate of occurrence, which is simply the # of past occurrences divided by the length of the original list. In Python it's very simple:

x is the given list of values

from collections import Counter
c = Counter(x)

def probability(a):
    # returns the probability of a given number a
    return float(c[a]) / len(x)