Generate lots of fake integers ( scores 1-5 ) without averaging out

Question

I'm writing an e-commerce website for school and i want to populate it with a couple thousand reviews, reclamations, orders, users, etc.

Reviews of a product include an integer score (1-5), and the product page displays an average score for each products

In my Review factory for the seeder i just have

  public function definition()
  {
    return[
      'user_id' => User::all()->random()->id,
      'book_id' => Book::all()->random()->id,
      'text' => fake()->paragraph,
      'score' => rand(1,5),
    ];
  }

This works fine except that, since i'm generating over 10k reviews, all my products average out to an average score of 3 ( Average score works fine, it's not a bug ).

Question: How would i go about generating random scores that wouldn't average out ?

Answer 1

You could use some property of the book to generate different score ranges.

Here's an example with the book ID:

public function definition()
{
    $book = Book::all()->random();

    if ($book->id % 2 === 1) {
        $score = random_int(3, 5); // better score
    } else {
        $score = random_int(1, 3); // worse score
    }

    return[
        'user_id' => User::all()->random()->id,
        'book_id' => $book->id,
        'text' => fake()->paragraph,
        'score' => $score,
    ];
}   

Assuming the book ID is an integer sequence, half the books should have a "bad to medium" score and the rest will have "medium to good". You can increase the modulus to program in more cases.