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Random Number Generation

Part of the Springer Handbooks of Computational Statistics book series (SHCS)

Abstract

The fields of probability and statistics are built over the abstract concepts of probability space and random variable. This has given rise to elegant and powerful mathematical theory, but exact implementation of these concepts on conventional computers seems impossible. In practice, random variables and other random objects are simulated by deterministic algorithms. The purpose of these algorithms is to produce sequences of numbers or objects whose behavior is very hard to distinguish from that of their “truly random” counterparts, at least for the application of interest. Key requirements may differ depending on the context.For Monte Carlo methods, the main goal is to reproduce the statistical properties on which these methods are based, so that the Monte Carlo estimators behave as expected, whereas for gambling machines and cryptology, observing the sequence of output values for some time should provide no practical advantage for predicting the forthcoming numbers better than by just guessing at random.

Keywords

  • Random Number Generator
  • Binary Search
  • Output Sequence
  • Linear Feedback Shift Register
  • Linear Recurrence

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and a Canada Research Chair to the author. Wolfgang Hörmann, Josef Leydold, François Panneton, and Richard Simard made helpful comments and corrections on an earlier draft. The author has been asked to write chapters on Random Number Generation for several handbooks and encyclopedia over the years. Inevitably, there is a large amount of duplication between these chapters.

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L’Ecuyer, P. (2012). Random Number Generation. In: Gentle, J., Härdle, W., Mori, Y. (eds) Handbook of Computational Statistics. Springer Handbooks of Computational Statistics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21551-3_3

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