Normally distribute occurence or counts

Question

I am creating a mock of sales data. One of the columns is salesperson_id where each id can occur more than once (a salesperson can have multiple sales). I want to generate this column in such a way that if I create a chart of distribution of sale count (not total sales) per salesperson_id, it would be a normal curve.

Let's say I have an array of unique salesperson_id called salespersons, I want to generate n number of records. For example, I have 6 salespersons and I want to generate total of 14 records. This would be the distribution of their counts:

id  count
---------
A   1
B   2
C   4
D   4
E   2
F   1

If arranged in a bar chart, this would look like a normal distribution. I also need some way to control the 'flatness' of the chart.

Answer 1

Here is one way to do it:

from collections import Counter

from numpy.random import binomial

# Generate mock sales data by randomly sampling if a salesperson makes a sale  
p = 0.5 # Control "flatness" of distribution
n_records = 14
salesperson_id = binomial(n=100, p=p, size=n_records).tolist() # Binomial is a reasonable approximation for a discrete normal distribution
count_per_salesperson = Counter(salesperson_id)
id, count = zip(*count_per_salesperson.items())