R for dummies

October 19, 2012

(This article was first published on Xi'an's Og » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Just saw this nice review of R for dummies. And thought after this afternoon class that my students in the simulation course at Paris-Dauphine could clearly benefit from reading it! They in fact had a terrible time simulating a truncated normal distribution by accept-reject. As they could not get the notion of normalising constants… (Yes, indeed, this very truncated normal distribution!) Even the validity of simulating a normal variate until the truncation is satisfied was not obvious to them and they took forever to program the corresponding code. Anyway, I will certainly order the book to check for myself (after receiving Genetics for dummies to make sure I use the right vocabulary, even though it is a bit too light in the end…)! And write a review for CHANCE if it generates enough interest in doing so…