Java: Power Law Distribution

Question

I'm trying to generate p2p network according to power law distribution. How to generate power law distribution in java? does it have any library?

thanks :)

Answer 1

Maybe the Colt java library can help. It generates random numbers according to many distributions.

Answer 2

Apache Commons Math library has an implementation for Zipf's distribution, which is a power law.

Answer 3

If you can't/don't want to use a library:

In this case, the easiest way to go is to work out the CDF (check it against Wikipedia), that is the function F : x -> P(X < x). Then you draw uniform random numbers y on [0,1] with your favorite generator, and you solve y = F(x). The sequence of such x are identically distributed and follow a Power Law Distribution.

Edit: the answer is there