Review of random variate generation articles for a programmer audience (original) (raw)

The following pages of mine deal with random variate generation, Bernoulli factories, and exact sampling. They contain numerous algorithms for such sampling.

My audience for these articles is computer programmers with mathematics knowledge, but little or no familiarity with calculus.

I post this issue to seek comments on the following aspects:

• Are the algorithms in the articles easy to implement? Is each algorithm written so that someone could write code for that algorithm after reading the article?
• Do the articles have errors that should be corrected?
• Are there ways to make the articles more useful to the target audience?

Comments on other aspects of these articles are also welcome.

The articles follow:

• Randomization and Sampling Methods
• More Random Sampling Methods
• Partially-Sampled Random Numbers for Accurate Sampling of Continuous Distributions
• Arbitrary-Precision Samplers for the Sum or Ratio of Uniform Random Variates
• Bernoulli Factory Algorithms
• Supplemental Notes for Bernoulli Factory Algorithms
• More Algorithms for Arbitrary-Precision Sampling
• Miscellaneous Observations on Randomization
• Randomized Estimation Algorithms

Letting them know: @lmendo, @PaulSanchez, @maciej-bendkowski