When I call rnorm
passing a single value as mean, it's obvious what happens: a value is generated from Normal(10,1).
y <- rnorm(20, mean=10, sd=1)
But, I see examples of a whole vector being passed to rnorm
(or rcauchy
, etc..); in this case, I am not sure what the R machinery really does. For example:
a = c(10,22,33,44,5,10,30,22,100,45,97)
y <- rnorm(a, mean=a, sd=1)
Any ideas?
The number of random numbers rnorm
generates equals the length of a. From ?rnorm
:
n: number of observations. If ‘length(n) > 1’, the length is taken to be the number required.
To see what is happening when a
is passed to the mean argument, it's easier if we change the example:
a = c(0, 10, 100)
y = rnorm(a, mean=a, sd=1)
[1] -0.4853138 9.3630421 99.7536461
So we generate length(a)
random numbers with mean a[i]
.