[Numpy-discussion] bug in stats.randint

[josef.pktd@gmai...]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Flavio Coelho <fccoelho@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I stumbled upon something I think is a bug in scipy:
>
> In [4]: stats.randint(1.,15.).ppf([.1,
> .2,.3,.4,.5])
> Out[4]: array([ 2.,  3.,  5.,  6.,  7.])
>
> When you pass float arguments to stats.randint and then call the ppf method,
> you get an array of floats, which clearly wrong. The rvs method doesn't
> display this bug so I think is a matter of poor type checking in the ppf
> implementation...
>

I switched to using floats intentionally, to have correct handling of
inf and nans. and the argument checking is generic for all discrete
distributions and not special cased. Nans are converted to zero when
casting to integers, which is wrong and very confusing. inf raise an
exception. I prefer correct numbers to correct types. see examples
below

If you don't have inf and nans you can cast them to int yourself.

Josef

>>> aint = np.zeros(5,dtype=int)
>>> aint[0]= np.nan
>>> aint
array([0, 0, 0, 0, 0])
>>> aint[1]= np.inf
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#134>", line 1, in <module>
OverflowError: cannot convert float infinity to long

>>> from scipy import stats
>>> stats.poisson.ppf(1,1)
inf
>>> stats.poisson.ppf(2,1)
nan

>>> stats.poisson.ppf(1,1).astype(int)
-2147483648
>>> aint[2] = stats.poisson.ppf(1,1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#140>", line 1, in <module>
OverflowError: cannot convert float infinity to long