numpy.random.mtrand.RandomState

class numpy.random.mtrand.RandomState

Container for the Mersenne Twister pseudo-random number generator.

RandomState exposes a number of methods for generating random numbers drawn from a variety of probability distributions. In addition to the distribution-specific arguments, each method takes a keyword argument size that defaults to None. If size is None, then a single value is generated and returned. If size is an integer, then a 1-D array filled with generated values is returned. If size is a tuple, then an array with that shape is filled and returned.

Parameters:

seed : int or array_like, optional

Random seed initializing the pseudo-random number generator. Can be an integer, an array (or other sequence) of integers of any length, or None (the default). If seed is None, then RandomState will try to read data from /dev/urandom (or the Windows analogue) if available or seed from the clock otherwise.

Notes

The Python stdlib module “random” also contains a Mersenne Twister pseudo-random number generator with a number of methods that are similar to the ones available in RandomState. RandomState, besides being NumPy-aware, has the advantage that it provides a much larger number of probability distributions to choose from.

Methods

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