Sympy: Howto to rewrite erf function

Question

I have an expression in SymPy that involves the normal cumulative function, N(x) which is directly linked to the error function through the equation N(x)=0.5*erf(x/sqrt(2)) + 0.5. When I use the Normal(0,1).cdf(x) function of SymPy, it is written using the error function. So, when I output latex string of some (complicated) expression, the seem more complicated when using erf (instead of N(x), it outputs the equation mentionned obove). I tried to define a symbol N=0.5*erf(x/sqrt(2)) + 0.5 and tried the command 'rewrite' the rewrite my expression in terms of N, but 'rewrite' seems to work only with internally defined functions. Does any bodu know how to rewrite erf(some_expression) in terms of N(some_expression), given that I don't know some_expression in advance (can't use subs) ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I take it from your question that you are using Normal from sympy.statistics. You should move to sympy.stats. sympy.statistics has been deprecated for some time, and will be removed in the next version of SymPy.

To answer your question more directly, you can replace functions with functions using replace, like expr.replace(erf, lambda x: (N(x) - 0.5)/0.5).

The problem here is that there is no function N. I would expect this to be done better in sympy.stats, where the distributions are represented symbolically. However, I didn't find a way to do it. I opened https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/7819 for this.