# Statistical distributions¶

The generation of random samples that follow a specific data distribution is very important in many fields. This is why ironArray supports many of the most used statistical distributions (uniform, normal, exponential, binomial, bernoulli, poisson…).

In this tutorial, we will see how to generate random samples of these distributions using ironArray and we will compare them against the NumPy library.

## Generating random samples¶

In this example, we are going to generate a random sample of the exponential distribution, whose distribution function is

$\begin{split}f(x, \lambda) = \begin{cases} \lambda e^{-\lambda x} & x \geq 0 \\ 0 & x < 0 \\ \end{cases}\end{split}$

with $$\lambda = 5$$.

[1]:

import iarray as ia
import numpy as np

cfg = ia.Config(chunks=(1000, 1000), blocks=(250, 250))

x = ia.random.exponential((5000, 10000), 5, dtype=np.float64, cfg=cfg)


## Comparing against numpy¶

First, we create a random sample from the same distribution using numpy.

[2]:

np.random.seed(123)
y = np.random.exponential(5, 5000 * 10000).reshape(5000, 10000)


Then we extract a slice from each container to work with it (the calculations will be much faster).

[3]:

x2 = ia.iarray2numpy( x[:500, 1000:1250]).flatten()
y2 = y[1000:1500, 3000:3250].flatten()


After that, we can visually check that the two samples come from the same distribution by representing their histograms.

[4]:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

_, _, _ = plt.hist(x2, histtype='step', label="iarray")
_, _, _ = plt.hist(y2, histtype='step', label="numpy")

plt.legend()

plt.show()


Finally, we can mathematically check that the two samples come from the same distribution applying the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. To apply the test, we have to assume that the two samples come from the same distribution.

[5]:

from scipy.stats import kstest

statistic, pvalue = kstest(x2, y2)

print(f"D:       {statistic:.4f}")
print(f"p-value: {pvalue:.4f}")

D:       0.0042
p-value: 0.2252


As can be seen, since the p-value is very large ($$>0.05$$) the assumed hypothesis cannot be rejected.