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Survey methodology textbooks generally consider simple random sampling without replacement as the benchmark to compute the relative efficiency of other sampling approaches. [3] An unbiased random selection of individuals is important so that if many samples were drawn, the average sample would accurately represent the population.
Reservoir sampling is a family of randomized algorithms for choosing a simple random sample, without replacement, of k items from a population of unknown size n in a single pass over the items. The size of the population n is not known to the algorithm and is typically too large for all n items to fit into main memory .
An analogy for the working of the latter version is to sort a deck of cards by throwing the deck into the air, picking the cards up at random, and repeating the process until the deck is sorted. In a worst-case scenario with this version, the random source is of low quality and happens to make the sorted permutation unlikely to occur.
Random selection, when narrowly associated with a simple random sample, is a method of selecting items (often called units) from a population where the probability of choosing a specific item is the proportion of those items in the population. For example, with a bowl containing just 10 red marbles and 90 blue marbles, a random selection ...
It can be shown that if is a pseudo-random number generator for the uniform distribution on (,) and if is the CDF of some given probability distribution , then is a pseudo-random number generator for , where : (,) is the percentile of , i.e. ():= {: ()}. Intuitively, an arbitrary distribution can be simulated from a simulation of the standard ...
A simple algorithm to generate a permutation of n items uniformly at random without retries, known as the Fisher–Yates shuffle, is to start with any permutation (for example, the identity permutation), and then go through the positions 0 through n − 2 (we use a convention where the first element has index 0, and the last element has index n − 1), and for each position i swap the element ...
The example includes link to a matrix diagram that illustrates how Fisher-Yates is unbiased while the naïve method (select naïve swap i -> random) is biased. Select Fisher-Yates and change the line to have pre-decrement --m rather than post-decrement m--giving i = Math.floor(Math.random() * --m);, and you get Sattolo's algorithm where no item ...
In a "truly" random sequence of numbers of sufficient length, for example, it is probable there would be long sequences of nothing but repeating numbers, though on the whole the sequence might be random. Local randomness refers to the idea that there can be minimum sequence lengths in which random distributions are approximated. Long stretches ...