Given a date, I'm using pandas date_range to generate additional 30 dates:
import pandas as pd
from datetime import timedelta
pd.date_range(startdate, startdate + timedelta(days=30))
Out of these 30 dates, how can I randomly select 10 dates in order starting from date in first position and ending with date in last position?
np.random.choice to choose specified number of items from a given set of choices. 8 more dates at random.pd.to_datetime and sort_values to ensure they stay in order.dates = pd.date_range('2011-04-01', periods=30, freq='D')
random_dates = pd.to_datetime(
np.concatenate([
np.random.choice(dates[1:-1], size=8, replace=False),
dates[[0, -1]]
])
).sort_values()
random_dates
DatetimeIndex(['2011-04-01', '2011-04-02', '2011-04-03', '2011-04-13',
'2011-04-14', '2011-04-21', '2011-04-22', '2011-04-26',
'2011-04-27', '2011-04-30'],
dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq=None)
You can use numpy.random.choice with replace=False if is not necessary explicitly get first and last value (if yes use another answer):
a = pd.date_range('2011-04-01', periods=30, freq='D')
print (pd.to_datetime(np.sort(np.random.choice(a, size=10, replace=False))))
DatetimeIndex(['2011-04-01', '2011-04-03', '2011-04-05', '2011-04-09',
'2011-04-12', '2011-04-17', '2011-04-22', '2011-04-24',
'2011-04-29', '2011-04-30'],
dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq=None)
