edu.cornell.lassp.houle.RngPack
Class RandomElement

java.lang.Object
  |
  +--cern.colt.PersistentObject
        |
        +--edu.cornell.lassp.houle.RngPack.RandomElement

All Implemented Interfaces:

java.lang.Cloneable, java.io.Serializable

Direct Known Subclasses:

RandomJava, RandomSeedable, RandomShuffle, RandomStream

public abstract class RandomElement

extends PersistentObject

implements java.lang.Cloneable

RandomElement is an abstract class that encapsulates uniform random number generators.

Subclasses have entirelly deterministic behaviour: Constructing two instances with the same parameters at any two distinct points in time will produce identical sequences of numbers.

To base a class on it, you must define the method raw() as described below. It is also likely that you will want to define a constructor or another mechanism for seeding the the generator. The other classes defined in RandomElement add value to the numbers generated by raw()

Source code is available.

See Also:

RandomJava, RandomShuffle, Serialized Form

Constructor Summary

RandomElement()

Method Summary

int	choose(int hi)
int	choose(int lo, int hi)
double	gaussian() gaussian() uses the Box-Muller algorithm to transform raw()'s into gaussian deviates.
double	gaussian(double sd)
double	powlaw(double alpha, double cut) generate a power-law distribution with exponent alpha and lower cutoff cut
abstract double	raw() Returns a uniformly distributed pseudo-random number.
void	raw(double[] d) Fill an entire array with doubles.
void	raw(double[] d, int n) Fill part or all of an array with doubles.
double	uniform(double lo, double hi)

Methods inherited from class cern.colt.PersistentObject

clone

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object

equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait

Constructor Detail

RandomElement

public RandomElement()

Method Detail

choose

public int choose(int hi)

Parameters:

hi - upper limit of range

Returns:

a random integer in the range 1,2,... ,hi

choose

public int choose(int lo,
                  int hi)

Parameters:

lo - lower limit of range

hi - upper limit of range

Returns:

a random integer in the range lo, lo+1, ... ,hi

gaussian

public double gaussian()

gaussian() uses the Box-Muller algorithm to transform raw()'s into gaussian deviates.

Returns:

a random real with a gaussian distribution, standard deviation

gaussian

public double gaussian(double sd)

Parameters:

sd - standard deviation

Returns:

a gaussian distributed random real with standard deviation sd

powlaw

public double powlaw(double alpha,
                     double cut)

generate a power-law distribution with exponent alpha and lower cutoff cut

Parameters:

alpha - the exponent

cut - the lower cutoff

raw

public abstract double raw()

Returns a uniformly distributed pseudo-random number. The abstract method that must be defined to make a working RandomElement. See the class RandomJava for an example of how to do this.

Returns:

a random double in the range (0,1).

See Also:

RandomJava

raw

public void raw(double[] d)

Fill an entire array with doubles. This method calls raw(double d[],int n) with d=d.length. Since this adds little overhead for d.length large, it is only necessary to override raw(double d[],int n)

Parameters:

d - array to be filled with doubles.

raw

public void raw(double[] d,
                int n)

Fill part or all of an array with doubles. The method defined here uses multiple calls to raw() to fill the array. You can eliminate the overhead of multiple method calls by subclassing this with a version of the generator that fills the array. On our system this improves the efficiency of Ranecu by 20% when filling large arrays.

Parameters:

d - array to be filled with doubles

n - number of doubles to generate

uniform

public double uniform(double lo,
                      double hi)

Parameters:

lo - lower limit of range

hi - upper limit of range

Returns:

a uniform random double in the range (lo,hi).