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Product of two beta distributions


Say I have two random variables:

X ~ Beta(α1,β1)

Y ~ Beta(α2,β2)

I would like to compute distribution of Z = XY (the product of the random variables)

With scipy, I can get the pdf of a single Beta with:

from scipy.stats import beta
rv = beta(a, b)
x = np.linspace(start=0, stop=1, num=200)
my_pdf = rv.pdf(x)

But what about the product of two Betas? Can I do this analytically? (Python/Julia/R solutions are fine).


Solution

  • For an analytical solution, have a look at this paper and this answer.

    A numerical approach in R

    set.seed(1) # for reproducability
    
    n <- 100000 # number of random variables
    
    # first beta distribution
    a1 <- 0.5
    b1 <- 0.9
    X <- rbeta(n, a1, b1)
    
    # second beta distribution
    a2 <- 0.9
    b2 <- 0.5
    Y <- rbeta(n, a2, b2)
    
    # calculate product
    Z <- X * Y
    
    # Have a look at the distributions
    plot(density(Z), col = "red", main = "Distributions")
    lines(density(X), lty = 2)
    lines(density(Y), lty = 2)
    

    enter image description here