Code for Monte Carlo simulation: generate samples of given size in R

Question

I started by generating a sample of 500 uniformly-distributed random numbers between 0 and 1 using the code below:

set.seed(1234)
X<-runif(500, min=0, max=1)
         


        

Answer 1

You could try using data.table, a package that can be installed using install.packages("data.table"). With that installed, you would run something like...

> require(data.table)
> dt <- data.table(x=runif(500*10000),iter=rep(1:500,each=10000))
                  # x iter
      # 1: 0.48293196    1
      # 2: 0.61935416    1
      # 3: 0.99831614    1
      # 4: 0.26944687    1
      # 5: 0.38027524    1
     # ---                
# 4999996: 0.11314160  500
# 4999997: 0.07958396  500
# 4999998: 0.97690312  500
# 4999999: 0.81670765  500
# 5000000: 0.62934609  500
> summaries <- dt[,list(mean=mean(x),median=median(x)),by=iter]
     # iter      mean    median
  # 1:    1 0.5005310 0.5026592
  # 2:    2 0.4971551 0.4950034
  # 3:    3 0.4977677 0.4985360
  # 4:    4 0.5034727 0.5052344
  # 5:    5 0.4999848 0.4971214
 # ---                         
# 496:  496 0.5013314 0.5048186
# 497:  497 0.4955447 0.4941715
# 498:  498 0.4983971 0.4910115
# 499:  499 0.5000382 0.4997024
# 500:  500 0.5009614 0.4988237
> min_o_means <- min(summaries$mean)
# [1] 0.4914826

I think the syntax is fairly straightforward. You may want to look up some of the functions using ? (e.g., ?rep). The lines starting with # are just displaying the generated objects. In data.tables, the number to the left of the : is just the row number and --- indicates rows that are skipped in the display.