Simple addition to random module - Student's t

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Wed Sep 2 11:29:52 EDT 2009


On Sep 2, 2:51 pm, Thomas Philips <tkp... at gmail.com> wrote:
> While the random module allows one to generate randome numbers with a
> variety of distributions, some useful distributions are omitted - the
> Student's t being among them. This distribution is easily derived from
> the normal distribution and the chi-squared distribution (which in
> turn is a special case of the gamma distribution). I edited and tested
> a routine to generate random variables with a Student's t distribution
> that I found onhttp://www.johndcook.com/python_student_t_rng.html,
> which has  one bug - there is an extra factor of two in y. The
> corrected and tested code follows - how does one go about getting this
> incorporated into random so that the entire community can beneffit
> from it?

To get this into core Python, you'd usually submit a feature request
at http://bugs.python.org.  To maximize the chances of the feature
being accepted, provide unit tests and documentation along with the
code.  There's a lot of good information about how the Python
development process works at http://www.python.org/dev;  see
especially http://www.python.org/dev/contributing/.

Alternatively, you might also consider submitting something to the
Python package index, http://pypi.python.org/pypi, or posting this as
a recipe at http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/

--
Mark



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