We have N users with P avg. points per user, where each point is a single value between 0 and 1. We need to distribute the mass of each point using a normal distribution with a known density of 0.05 as the points have some uncertainty. Additionally, we need to wrap the mass around 0 and 1 such that e.g. a point at 0.95 will also allocate mass around 0. I've provided a working example below, which bins the normal distribution into D=50 bins. The example uses the Python typing module, but you can ignore that if you'd like.
from typing import List, Any
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
D = 50
BINS: List[float] = np.linspace(0, 1, D + 1).tolist()
def probability_mass(distribution: Any, x0: float, x1: float) -> float:
"""
Computes the area under the distribution, wrapping at 1.
The wrapping is done by adding the PDF at +- 1.
"""
assert x1 > x0
return (
(distribution.cdf(x1) - distribution.cdf(x0))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 + 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 + 1))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 - 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 - 1))
)
def point_density(x: float) -> List[float]:
distribution: Any = scipy.stats.norm(loc=x, scale=0.05)
density: List[float] = []
for i in range(D):
density.append(probability_mass(distribution, BINS[i], BINS[i + 1]))
return density
def user_density(points: List[float]) -> Any:
# Find the density of each point
density: Any = np.array([point_density(p) for p in points])
# Combine points and normalize
combined = density.sum(axis=0)
return combined / combined.sum()
if __name__ == "__main__":
# Example for one user
data: List[float] = [.05, .3, .5, .5]
density = user_density(data)
# Example for multiple users (N = 2)
print([user_density(x) for x in [[.3, .5], [.7, .7, .7, .9]]])
### NB: THE REMAINING CODE IS FOR ILLUSTRATION ONLY!
### NB: THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO COMPUTE THE DENSITY FAST!
middle: List[float] = []
for i in range(D):
middle.append((BINS[i] + BINS[i + 1]) / 2)
plt.bar(x=middle, height=density, width=1.0 / D + 0.001)
plt.xlim(0, 1)
plt.xlabel("x")
plt.ylabel("Density")
plt.show()
In this example N=1, D=50, P=4. However, we want to scale this approach to N=10000 and P=100 while being as fast as possible. It's unclear to me how we'd vectorize this approach. How do we best speed up this?
EDIT
The faster solution can have slightly different results. For instance, it could approximate the normal distribution instead of using the precise normal distribution.
EDIT2
We only care about computing density using the user_density() function. The plot is only to help explain the approach. We do not care about the plot itself :)
EDIT3
Note that P is the avg. points per user. Some users may have more and some may have less. If it helps, you can assume that we can throw away points such that all users have a max of 2 * P points. It's fine to ignore this part while benchmarking as long as the solution can handle a flexible # of points per user.


