Convolution Random Number Generator

In statistics and computer software, a convolution random number generator is a pseudo-random number sampling method that can be used to generate random variates from certain classes of probability distribution. The particular advantage of this type of approach is that it allows advantage to be taken of existing software for generating random variates from other, usually non-uniform, distributions. However, faster algorithms may be obtainable for the same distributions by other more complicated approaches.

A number of distributions can be expressed in terms of the (possibly weighted) sum of two or more random variables from other distributions. (The distribution of the sum is the convolution of the distributions of the individual random variables).

Read more about Convolution Random Number Generator:  Example

Famous quotes containing the words random, number and/or generator:

    “Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    “I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world’s problems.”
    —Robert Benchley (1889–1945)

    “He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)