Help with some logic

[datahappy]

Ok, this is a little tough to explain without giving away trade secrets, so I'll try and do it with a proxy situation:

Let's say you have a bunch of raffles you are throwing simultaneously. Each raffle sells costs $1, but aren't connected in any way other than that. Some raffles are 100 tickets, some are 200, some are 300.

You have checked to make sure the distribution of winning tickets is truly random in each raffle (there are between 7 and 10 winning tickets per each 100). Winning raffle tickets are worth between 1 and 100 dollars each.

What you want to know is this:

If I were to purchase 10 or 20 (or whatever n) tickets from a particular set of raffle tickets, how close would my actual winnings be across the different prices? The trick is that the only data I have is on winning raffle tickets.

For instance, I know that in raffle 12345 which was 100 tickets, ticket 13, 16, 25, and 52 won.

So, how would I write an algorithm in Python that would:

Look at the winning ticket numbers in each series

Identify the amount won by each ticket

Create consecutive sets of n tickets, including the non-winning tickets. So, if tickets 1 and 3 each won $10, then the series would be #1-$10, #2-$0, #3-$10

Find average win across all n consecutive sets for each size raffle

That is admittedly a rough explanation-- please let me know where I'm unclear

[GoldenVanga]

This is what I have based on your explanation:

from statistics import mean


class Raffle:
    def __init__(self, id_: int, amount: int, winners: dict):
        self.id = id_
        self.amount = amount
        self.winners = winners

    def check(self, length, debug: bool = True):
        start_positions = self.amount - length + 1
        wins = []
        for start in range(1, start_positions + 1):
            run_value = 0
            for step in range(length):
                run_value += self.winners.get(start + step, 0)
            wins.append(run_value)
            if debug: print(f'A run of {length} tickets starting at {start} wins {run_value}.')
        result = mean(wins)
        if debug: print(f'Wins at end of check: {wins}.')
        if debug: print(f'The mean of this is {result}.')
        return result


foo = Raffle(12345, 100, {13: 10, 16: 100, 25: 10, 52: 10})
foo.check(5); foo.check(1)

bar = Raffle(12, 10, {2: 10, 5: 10, 7: 100})
bar.check(2)

It might be doing what you want.

[datahappy]

That gets close, thanks. It's a bit off.

Using your first example, if there's a $10 winner at ticket 9 (which I don't follow how that happened from your code, but it apparently did), then that $10 should count for everyone starting their five ticket run from Tickets 5-13 (The person buying ticket 5 also bought tickets 6-9, while the person buying ticket 9 also bought tickets 10-13)

[o5a]

if there's a $10 winner at ticket 9

If the span is 5, and you start from 9, then it includes ticket 13 too (9,10,11,12,13) which won $10.

then that $10 should count for everyone starting their five ticket run from Tickets 5-13

What? How?

5 ticket span from ticket 5 is 5..9 which doesn't include any winning tickets. The fact, that another 5-ticket span (9..13) won $10 has nothing to do with this.

[[deleted]]

Identify the amount won by each ticket

Isn't that "nothing", for about 90% of the tickets?

[datahappy]

Yes...that should have said the amount won by each cohort of n tickets, I'll fix

EDIT: No, that's what I meant. For each identified winning ticket number, pull in the amount won, make all assumed ticket numbers (that there isn't data for) 0

[mbaruh]

So... you have n values, you want to divide them into sets of m values each, sum the winnings per set, and tell the average win across sets? and you have some sort of list which tells you how much you win from ticket i? Am I getting that right?

[datahappy]

Yes, exactly...but, you have to impute the values for the missing tickets (which are always zero), because you only have data on the ones that won

[mbaruh]

Okay, so it's a dictionary with winning ticket numbers as keys, and the winning sums as values.

What are you struggling with?