Hi Jarvis, I tried the scipy function. I don't understand it. Look, if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_Distribution wiki's Poisson distribution documentation you'll find that this is the naive way to compute a Poisson probability mass function
>>> lam = 1 >>> k = 2 >>> math.exp(-lam) * lam**k / factorial(k) 0.18393972058572117 Notice that it matches the figure in the wiki page (the red curve). Now, the scipy module does this: >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([3]) >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([2]) >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([2]) >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([4]) >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([3]) >>> stats.distributions.poisson.rvs(1, 2) array([2]) The python documentation on this functionality is extremely poor. Look >>> help("scipy.stats.distributions.poisson.rvs") Help on method rvs in scipy.stats.distributions.poisson: scipy.stats.distributions.poisson.rvs = rvs(self, *args, **kwds) method of scipy.stats.distributions.poisson_gen instance Do you understand what's going on? Thanks, culpritNr1 -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Gamma-distribution-function-tp21444899p21445597.html Sent from the Python - tutor mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor