Random sequence generator with full coverage of interval

Question

Can somebody suggest me a random (integer) number generation algorithm such that given an interval, it is absolutely guaranteed to cover all the given interval (i.e. o numbers are missing)? No other constraints, e.g. no uniqueness of numbers, no hypotheses on distribution etc...

The idea is the following:

myRandom(1, 4)

Outputs a sequence like:

1, 4, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 4, 1, 3, 2

Ralf Stubner · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-09 07:53:41Z

1

You somehow have to tell your function how many elements you want, say n. If that is known (or you have some reasonable default) you can use:

create sequence from your input values
select with replacement n - sequence_length values from your sequence
concatenate the sequence with the selected values
shuffle the result

Sample code in R using 4 * (to - from) as default value for n:

myRandom <- function(from, to, n = 4 * (to - from)) {
    values <- seq.int(from, to)
    selection <- sample(values, n - length(values), replace = TRUE)
    values <- c(values, selection)
    sample(values)
}

myRandom(1, 4)
#>  [1] 1 4 3 3 3 4 4 2 3 2 1 2

^{Created on 2019-07-09 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

answered Jul 9, 2019 at 7:53

Ralf Stubner

26.9k4 gold badges44 silver badges79 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Random sequence generator with full coverage of interval

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related