javascript - How to generate a random weighted distribution of elements

Question

I would like to return an array which has a set of unique elements randomly distributed according to custom frequency. My real world use-case is the repetition of carousel images based on a qualitative weighting of how popular those images are.

E.g. suppose I have 5 elements with weights:

A, 20% B, 50% C, 80% D, 10%

I would like to write a function that, given a length, tries to approximate a sequence such that C will appear eight times more often than D; D will appear 5 times less often than B; A will appear three times less often than C.

Answer 1

C will appear eight times more often than D; D will appear 5 times less often than B; A will appear three times less often than C.

You can do that with a weighted array of your elements:

var elems = ["A", "B", "C", "D"];
var weights = [2, 5, 8, 1]; // weight of each element above
var totalWeight = weights.reduce(add, 0); // get total weight (in this case, 16)

function add(a, b) { return a + b; } // helper function

var weighedElems = [];
var currentElem = 0;
while (currentElem < elems.length) {
  for (i = 0; i < weights[currentElem]; i++)
    weighedElems[weighedElems.length] = elems[currentElem];
  currentElem++;
}

console.log(weighedElems);

This will produce an array like

["A", "A", "B", "B", "B", "B", "B", "C", "C", "C", "C", "C", "C", "C", "C", "D"]

so you can choose randomly from that like so

var rnd = Math.floor(Math.random() * totalWeight);
console.log(weighedElems[rnd]);

Resources:

• Generate A Weighted Random Number
• Weighted random number generation in Javascript
• Algorithm for generating weighed random numbers