Matlab to Python conversion of rand()

Question

In Matlab I have the following:

duration = 20
n=5
times = rand(1,n)*duration;

The variable "times" gives a 1-by-n matrix, which is populated with random numbers between 0 and 1, then multiplied by 20. This will result in a set of 5 numbers between 0 and 20.

Now I want to achieve the same in Python, what would be the equivalent? I tried the following:

times = random.uniform(1,durations,n)  %% or times = random.uniform(1,20,5)

But I get this error:

TypeError: uniform() takes exactly 3 arguments (4 given)

which does not make sense to me, because I only seem to have given it 3 arguments.

Answer 1

random.uniform only accepts the upper and lower bounds of your random numbers. You will want to call random.uniform n times to create a list of random values.

values = [random.uniform(0, 20) for _ in range(5)]

Alternately, you could use numpy.random.rand to do this similarly to MATLAB and the function will return a numpy array.

import numpy as np
values = np.random.rand(1, 5) * 20

If you are converting much code from MATLAB to Python, numpy is recommended over using standard datatypes due to it's computational speed and similar behavior to MATLAB.