pick by probability

Hi everyone,

I have a question concerning the picking of a specific item from a list.

I have two equally long lists, one containing actual data and one containing the chance that the data in the first list is accurate.

The list with chances are all decimals between 0 and 1, added together giving one. They can be seen as a percentage. To illustrate my question, a very simpple example:

List 1: A, B, C, D

List 2: 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 0.125

This means a 12.5% chance of A, a 25% chance of B etc.

How to 'randomly' pick one item from list 1, taking the probability as given in list 2 in account?

Thanks in advance,

Sander

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on November 26, 2011 at 8:48pm

hi sander,

multiply list 2 with 100 or even 1000, feed it into the duplicate data component and create a corresponding number of entries for each entry in list 1 - then randomly pick a entry from this new list (by setting the end of the range to the list length of the new list)

best,

chris

Permalink Reply by Yoann Mescam (Systemiq) on November 27, 2011 at 1:16am

And if you like it complicated:

Permalink Reply by Georgios Anagnostopoulos on January 3, 2013 at 1:55pm

sharp!

Permalink Reply by sandervdholst on November 27, 2011 at 10:12am

Hi Chris,

Thank you for this simple solution. It works perfect for me! I had however to flip the matrix for both lists in order to get the desired list. At first it created a list in which all list items of the first list were duplicated according all items in the second list.

Also thanks of course for the more complicated solution, though I like to keep things simple this time.

Sander

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