SampleToSum: Draw a Random Sample that Sums to a Specified Amount

In mrdwab/mrdwabmisc: Miscellaneous R functions, mostly for data processing

Description

This function creates a random sample of numbers drawn from a specified range which sum to a specified amount.

Usage

SampleToSum(Target = 100, VecLen = 10, InRange = 1:100, Tolerance = 2,
  writeProgress = NULL)

Arguments

Target	The desired sum of all the samples
VecLen	How many numbers should be in your resulting vector?
InRange	What is the acceptable range of values to be sampled from?
Tolerance	What is the maximum difference allowed between the target and the sum? Set to "0" to match the target exactly. In general, the difference is within 5 anyway, which is reasonable.
writeProgress	If you want a log-file to be written that includes all the variations tried before arriving at a vector that satisfies all the user's conditions, specify the output file name (quoted) with this argument. Note that in some cases, this might be quite a large file with tens-of-thousands of lines!

Note

This function can be notoriously slow, particularly if your range is too narrow and your tolerance is too high.

Author(s)

Ananda Mahto

References

This function was written as a response to the following Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/14684539/1270695

See Also

sample, runif

Examples

set.seed(1)
SampleToSum()
SampleToSum(Tolerance = 0)
replicate(5,
 SampleToSum(Target = 1376,
             VecLen = 13,
             InRange = 10:200,
             Tolerance = 0),
 simplify = FALSE)
replicate(5,
 SampleToSum(Target = 1376,
             VecLen = 13,
             InRange = 10:200),
 simplify = FALSE)

mrdwab/mrdwabmisc documentation built on May 23, 2019, 7:15 a.m.