# A Julia version of the multinomial sampler

March 12, 2012
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(This article was first published on A second megabyte of memory, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

In the previous post on RcppEigen I described an example of sampling from collection of multinomial distributions represented by a matrix of probabilities.  In the timing example the matrix was 100000 by 5 with each of the 100000 rows summing to 1.  The objective is to create a vector of 100000 1-based indices representing a sample from the probabilities in each row.

For each row we take the cumulative sums and, for safety, normalize by dividing by the last element then compare these values to a random draw from a standard uniform distribution.  The number of elements in the cumulative sums that are less than the uniform draw is the 0-based index of the result.  We add 1 to convert to a 1-based index.

I have been experimenting a bit with a very interesting new language called Julia and decided to write a similar function in it. The version shown here has been updated according to suggestions from Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski and Viral Shah on the julia-dev  list at Google Groups
function samp1(x::Array{Float64, 2},)    cs = cumsum(reshape(x, length(x)))    sum(cs/cs[end] < rand()) + 1endfunction samp(X::Array{Float64, 2},)    if any(X < 0)        error("Negative probabilities not allowed")    end    [samp1(X[i,:]) | i = 1:size(X,1)]end
This version is about 10 times as fast as the pure R version but about 9 times slower than the RcppEigenversion.

Update:
In the thread on the julia-dev list about this example Stefan Karpinski showed that in Julia you can enhance performance by de-vectorizing your code and came up with the following version which is much faster than the RcppEigenversion
  function SKsamp(X::Matrix{Float64})  if any(X < 0)    error("Negative probabilities not allowed")  end  s = Array(Int, size(X,1))  for i = 1:size(X,1)    r = rand()    for j = 1:size(X,2)      r -= X[i,j]      if r <= 0.0        s[i] = j        break      end    end  end  return send         
To a longtime R/S programmer the concept of de-vectorizing your code seems heretical but I can understand that code created by a JITwill be happier with the looping and break style.

In any case, I think this example shows that R programmers should take a look at Julia. Two immediate applications I can imagine are McMC methods and large scale iterative fits such as Generalized linear models