CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonrandomstatisticsscipy
Chiefy
Chiefy

Reputation: 119

Checking for randomness using the Chi-Square Test

I'm running a simulation for a class project that relies heavily on random number generators, and as a result we're asked to test the random number generator to see just how "random" it is using the Chi-Square static. After looking through the some posts here, I used the follow code to find the answer:

from random import randint
import numpy as np
from scipy.stats import chisquare
numIterations = 1000  #I've run it with other numbers as well

observed = []
for i in range(0, numIterations):
    observed.append(randint(0, 100))
data = np.array(observed)
print "(chi squared statistic, p-value) with", numOfIter, "samples generated: ", chisquare(data)

However, I'm getting a p-value of zero when numIterations is greater than 10, which doesn't really make sense considering the null hypothesis is that the data is uniform. Am I misinterpreting the results? Or is my code simply wrong?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2812

Answers (2)

Voltage Spike
Voltage Spike

Reputation: 160

Depending on what distribution your going for you can test for it, remember that having more samples will approximate the distribution better (if you could take an infinite number of samples you would have the actual distribution). Since in real life we can't run our number generators an infinite number of times we only deal with approximated situations, so we bin the distribution (see how many numbers fall into a bin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine). Now if you ran your bean machine and you found that one of the bins was significantly higher than the expected distribution (in this case Gaussian) then you would say that the process is not Gaussian. Same thing with chi squared except your the shape is different than Gaussian because your sampling multiple normal (special case Gaussian) distributions. Since you want to find out if your data is normal/gaussian (think of shapes, the shapes are determined by the distributions parameters ie mean std kurtosis) here is an example of how to do that: http://www.real-statistics.com/tests-normality-and-symmetry/statistical-tests-normality-symmetry/chi-square-test-for-normality/

I don't know what your data is so I can't really tell you what to look for. All in all you will need to know what your statistical data that your given is then try to fit it to a model (in this case chi-squared) then ask yourself if it matches up with the model (the curve, your probably trying to find if its Gaussian/normal or not which you can do with the chi-squared test). You should google chi-squared, Gaussian normal ect ect.

Upvotes: 0

pjs
pjs

Reputation: 19853

A chi-square test checks how many items you observed in a bin vs how many you expected to have in that bin. It does so by summing the squared deviations between observed and expected across all bins. You can't just feed it raw data, you need to bin it first using something like scipy.stats.histogram.

Upvotes: 1

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