# Construction of hash function with a given distribution

Two questions about the construction of a hash function:
Let $$U = \{u_1,...,u_n\}$$ be a set of size $$n$$, and suppose that one is interested in a function $$h\colon U \rightarrow [0,1]$$ such that $$h$$ "looks like" it maps each of the $$u_i$$s to a random number, chosen from the uniform distribution on $$[0,1]$$. One simple way to construct such $$h$$ is to store in the memory a table of size $$n$$, and saving, for each element $$u_i$$, the corresponding random sample. This is obviously very inefficient, and impossible to do if $$U$$ is infinite (or even continuous). Are there known approaches (or lower bounds) for the discrete, finite case? Are there approaches for the continuous case (i.e. $$U$$ is a continuous set)?
Clarification for the continues domain case:
Suppose that $$U = \mathbb{R}$$. What I am after is a function $$h : U \rightarrow [0,1]$$ such that $$h(u)$$ has the property of "being random" i.e. if you sample many points from $$\mathbb{R}$$, and look at $$h(x_1),...,h(x_m)$$ they would look like numbers which were sampled from uniform distribution

• Use a hash function. Interpret the result as the binary expansion of a number in $[0,1)$. – Yuval Filmus May 27 at 11:21
• Are there hash functions for continuous domains? – SomeoneHAHA May 27 at 13:03
• In your case it’s the range which is continuous. – Yuval Filmus May 27 at 13:09
• I am also interested in a continuous domain: $h : U \rightarrow [0,1]$ where $U$ is a continuous set – SomeoneHAHA May 27 at 13:16
• This sounds like a different question... the model isn’t completely clear, anyhow. How is the input accessed? What are the required properties? – Yuval Filmus May 27 at 13:17