Exact sublinear binomial sampling

Martín Farach-Colton, Meng-Tsung Tsai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Drawing a random variate from a given binomial distribution B(n,p) is an important subroutine in many large-scale simulations. The naive algorithm takes O(n) time and has no precision loss, however, this method is often too slow in many settings. The problem of sampling from a binomial distribution in sublinear time has been extensively studied and implemented in such packages as R [22] and the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) [10], however, all known sublinear-time algorithms involve precisions loss, which introduces artifacts into the sampling, such as discontinuities. In this paper, we present the first algorithm, to the best of our knowledge, that samples binomial distributions in sublinear time with no precision loss.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithms and Computation - 24th International Symposium, ISAAC 2013, Proceedings
Pages240-250
Number of pages11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event24th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, ISAAC 2013 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: 16 Dec 201318 Dec 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8283 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, ISAAC 2013
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period16/12/1318/12/13

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