tdunning/knn — Issue #3: Need generator for nominal data
Author: tdunning
Created: 2012-02-15 05:45:58+00:00
State: open

The input here would be a frequency distribution. The samples would be drawn from the discrete distribution specified as the input.

Some ways to describe the discrete distribution include:

a) using a multiset containing counts

b) using a map containing counts

c) using a specification of a long-tailed distribution of some kind. One option would be to specify a power law and vocabulary size.

d) using a chinese restaurant process or Pittman-Yar process. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman%E2%80%93Yor_process

Note that the chinese restaurant process generates symbols from an infinite vocabulary so the assumption of a finite output set should not be built into the system.