Question

Hi I am trying to generate random numbers in MATLAB with a random MEAN value.

For example, if I use

e = mean(rand(1000,1))

the answer for e will always be close to 0.5.
What I want is for the value of e (mean) to be random,
so that e can be 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc…

Is it correct for me to use
e = mean( unifrnd(0,1,[1000,1]) ) ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Perhaps you want to generate normally distributed random numbers X~N(0,1) with randn. Then you can change the mean and standard deviation to be random. As an example:

N = 1000;
mu = rand*10 - 5;            %# mean in the range of [-5.0 5.0]
sigma = randi(5);            %# std in range of 1:5
X = randn(N, 1)*sigma + mu;  %# normally distributed with mean=mu and std=sigma