How to do weighted random sample of categories in python

Question

Given a list of tuples where each tuple consists of a probability and an item I\'d like to sample an item according to its probability. For example, give the list [ (.3, \'a\'),

Answer 1

This may be of marginal benefit but I did it this way:

import scipy.stats as sps
N=1000
M3 = sps.multinomial.rvs(1, p = [0.3,0.4,0.3], size=N, random_state=None)
M3a = [ np.where(r==1)[0][0] for r in M3 ] # convert 1-hot encoding to integers

This is similar to @eat's answer.